Low "% of time work is allowed " value
21 Sep 2008 15:58:53 UTC
Topic 193940
(moderation:
One of my computers (hostid=1252105) ran for a few hours with an incorrect (12/12/2008) date. A few WU's were completed during that interval. I think that this was the cause for EaH to compute "While BOINC running, % of time work is allowed - 7.7868 %" for that computer.
The condition was depicted in the BOINC Manager Statistics graph as a line from 9/12 to 12/12 and back to 9/13.
I allowed the computer to continue crunching in hopes that the number would return to approximately 99%, but no significant movement was observed.
The bad percent caused EaH to not populate the cache to planned level. Rather the amount of work acquired was limited under the assumption that the computer would be run only 7% of the time.
Fixes tried:
"Reset" the application was ineffective.
Uninstall/Reinstall BOINC did repair the problem.
Was there a better way?
Stan
Low "% of time work is allowed " value
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Yet another instance of the bugs reported at trac [trac]#588[/trac] - I do wish BOINC developers would put some effort into working through the old bugs sometimes, rather than always adding new features.
For reference, and in case it happens again, yes there is an alternative way.
In your BOINC folder (BOINC data folder for v6 users), there's a file called 'client_state.xml': it contains all the information about your BOINC installation, so don't mess with it lightly - but if you feel confident enough, you can edit it to correct errors like this.
Stop BOINC completely first, and make a backup. Then, use a simple text editor like Notepad to edit the file. In this case, your problem would have been with a section near the top, containing time statistics:
(Yours won't have the dots, but owing to another BOINC bug I can't show the file indenting without them)
Your problem will have been with either or . As here, these will be just marginally below one for an always-on computer. You could safely reset them to 1.000000 (six decimal places). Being careful not to change anything else in the file, save your changes and restart BOINC - your cache should come back to normal.
To be doubly sure, you could check with a Unix-to-human format converter like Online Conversion. If it's still saying early December (as I suspect it would be, if you hadn't done the reinstall), you should reset it to the current time (again, in Unix format with six decimal places - though it doesn't actually have to be accurate to a microsecond) - otherwise, the automatic self-updating that BOINC should normally do will be inhibited.
RE: Yet another instance of
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Thank you, Richard! You have most kindly increased my knowledge base.
I suspected that it was not a new issue, but a few searches of the board didn't unearth the info. (I did look through the BOINC files to see if I could "psych out" a solution, but gave up after one ineffective try.)
I've no idea how the clock got exactly 3 months off ... either my time sync software burped or I fat fingered something. That is unlikely, though, since I don't fiddle around with the computer date-time. And, nobody else sits at this keyboard. Oh, well ...
Stan