Old/stale files in Projects folder
17 Feb 2011 17:34:54 UTC
Topic 195657
(moderation:
I have quite a few old/stale files in the Einstein Project folder. They go as far back as S5R2 program, which is dated 9/4/07. I deleted all the old files, but when I restarted BOINC, it redownloaded them. What do I need to do to get rid of those old files?
Old/stale files in Projects folder
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One of the reasons why this has occurred is that you may have had breaks in crunching so that your machine may not have been on line at the time the servers were sending messages to delete old files. I notice similar behaviour if I resurrect a machine that has been off for a long time (eg a year or more).
The easiest way to solve the problem is to stop BOINC and remove the complete ... entries for all the old files. Anything belonging to S5R2 should be long gone. Once you have done that and restarted BOINC, BOINC will no longer be aware of those old files and you can delete them with impunity.
Just be very careful not to touch any entries related to current crunching activity. If in doubt, leave the entry alone.
Cheers,
Gary.
RE: The easiest way to
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...from client_state.xml. ;-)
Gruß,
Gundolf
Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)
RE: RE: The easiest way
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Thanks :-).
Surely everyone knows about the state file by now so I wouldn't need to actually mention it would I? :-).
Cheers,
Gary.
Should I remove the entries
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Should I remove the entries for S5R2, S5R3, etc.?
If I remove any of the entries for current work, will they be rebuilt when I restart BOINC?
BTW, I'm going to wait until I have all my Einstein WUs finished and reported before I make any changes.
RE: Should I remove the
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Initially, I thought you were referring to the old LIGO data files for these runs. For the apps themselves, I imagine there are both ... AND ... entries. I don't know for sure but deleting just the entries should allow you to delete the apps. I also imagine you could delete both types of entries and not have any problems. My guess is that the project should delete those entries anyway (since they are not current apps) once the blocks are gone.
If you delete anything current, you will trash anything that depends on that entry. BOINC will recover eventually but you may suffer a reduction to your daily quota along with the loss of both unstarted and partly completed work.
In that case you don't face much risk of losing anything. All my comments about what to do were based on minimising the loss of crunching time without having to wait for all work to finish. Stop->edit->restart - about a minute or two at most - and BOINC just picks up from where it left off.
Cheers,
Gary.
I got rid of a bunch of
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I got rid of a bunch of S5R2-5 exe files. I deleted both the "app" and "file_info" entries from the client_state.xml file.
However, there are still some files of the form h1_1393.40_S5R4. Can these be discarded?
RE: I got rid of a bunch of
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Not necessarily. Data files in that format are still in use for the current S5GC1HF search, and if you have any tasks with 1393 in their name (or something close by), the file may still be needed. Einstein re-uses these data files many times over: otherwise, every single S5GC1HF task would require abot 120 MB of data download.
We had quite a detailed discussion last year about what, and how, to delete. This link drops you into the middle of the thread, where we're discussing the 'how' of deletion: read the posts leading up to mine for an understanding of what files are needed for a task to run, and how some files (mainly _S5R7) may have got left behind by an earlier code bug. Rather a lot of reading, I'm afraid.
I read a lot of that thread,
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I read a lot of that thread, then decided, since I have drained all my queues and reported all results (from all projects), that I would simply do a "reset" on all my projects and let them start afresh. Doing the resets cleaned up a bunch of stale files from projects that have not been active for months/years (like LHC).
Thanks for pointing me to that thread.