Quick note: We need to do some maintenance on ralph, so 5.13 won't be ready there in the next half hour -- but hopefully later this evening.

Hi all:

Looks like the high rate of page faults is a separate issue that's been around for a while, since at least 5.01 according to Feet1st's screen shots. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Being a Windows novice, I didn't see that the task manager would give a PF column (it wasn't on by default on my test machine!). So I'll now look into that. My current WUs aren't showing a high rate of PF's, though.

But the main issue now is the severe slowdown some users are seeing with 5.12, and didn't see with 5.07. We think this problem is due to new debugging code that the Boinc team helped us add to the Windows build. For those of you who have seen this slowdown in Windows Media Player or Internet connections, could you possibly attach to ralph? I am posting a new app there (5.13) which is the same as 5.12 but without the new debugging stuff. Hopefully it has the fix. But I need your input! I'm sending out some jobs now with 5.12, and in about half an hour I'll send more out with 5.13.

Rhiju, I don't have any 5.12 crunching as yet. Not seeing the problem at the moment, and all of my observations were on prior releases. I was thinking of starting a thread and saying "Let's just talk about those that pull > 1m faults per hour of runtime", because I was seeing maybe 30% of WUs were doing just that... on PCs with 1GB of memory.

I pushed some screenshots of 3 WUs up to the web for you to see. I will try to be more dilligent when the 5.12 WUs come through my cache. Is there more info. I should try to capture? I've got WU name, runtime, total page faults, R@H version... anything else?

[edit] I think the screen shots will answer your question about how (at least for my machines) I've been monitoring page faults. I'm looking at task manager PF Delta and "Page Faults" (the total for the PID).

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In the Task Manager, click "View", then click "Select columns", add those of interest.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

MSI K8t Neo motherboard, Athlon 64 754 pin 3000+ cpu, multiple sata drives; 1 Gig ram, MSI fx5600 video card (nvidia drivers). My system has been less responsive than normal for a few days; and actually takes 15 seconds after right clicking on an .avi file before I get the windows options. Second time: 6 seconds.
After totally killing off Rosetta and Boinc: Less than 1 second.

WinXP sp2, and all the updates except the last Windows Genuine Advantage Notification installed. Jump_allbarcodes_antiparallel_1tul_save_all_out_491_15535_0 was only eating up about 49Megs..

If still needed tonight when I return home, I'll connect up to Ralph and see if it acts the same.

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Perfect. We'd be very grateful if you attached to ralph. I've queued up a lot of work. Ralph 5.13 is up!

MSI K8t Neo motherboard, Athlon 64 754 pin 3000+ cpu, multiple sata drives; 1 Gig ram, MSI fx5600 video card (nvidia drivers). My system has been less responsive than normal for a few days; and actually takes 15 seconds after right clicking on an .avi file before I get the windows options. Second time: 6 seconds.
After totally killing off Rosetta and Boinc: Less than 1 second.

WinXP sp2, and all the updates except the last Windows Genuine Advantage Notification installed. Jump_allbarcodes_antiparallel_1tul_save_all_out_491_15535_0 was only eating up about 49Megs..

If still needed tonight when I return home, I'll connect up to Ralph and see if it acts the same.

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There seems to be more discussion here than on ralph boards so I'll add my bit.

Dell mb P4 3.2, HT but using only 1/2 of it for boinc, 1GB ram, ati radeon 9800
Started noticing degradation around the time of ralph 5.11 but didn't pin it to ralph until 5.12.

I do look at ralph graphics occasionally and use the boinc screensaver limited to 5 minutes, but when I was troubleshooting this I wasn't looking at graphics and was too active for the screensaver to kick in. Would hate to see the graphics go, unless they're made optional.

Currently task-damager says ralph's memory usage is about 72MB with VM size 118MB. And yes, it's showing over 2K-4K+ (!) PF every second, which is not wonderful and I'd really like to know what it's doing. This wu has been running 40 cpu minutes and has 2.7 million page faults. Thankfully the memory size is growing only slowly, or this box would be on its lips by now.

I set my prefs down to 2 hours to get rid of this last 5.12 wu then will restart boinc and start some ralph 5.13 if there are any left by then, to see if things improve. Any further comments from me will go to the ralph boards.

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While I have no doubt of the reports in this thread. I cannot duplicate the problem on a fairly common Dell laptop. I can't get it to show this degradation at all. It will even ingest video through the firewire port and convert it to MPG2 real time without dropping frames. When it is doing that I can see BOINC yielding the CPU, and coming back in when the video turns off.

Checking the Page faults, it is generating some but I would expect a few as the process runs. The application is using around 107MB of memory. But this is a really clean system without a lot of software running other than windows, and BOINC.

I am not seeing any of this problem on a powerBook, or a G4 dual either.

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Just downloaded and installed rosetta 5.12 tonight. Experienced a problem with unresponsive apps after letting PC sit idle for a while, but killing BOINC fixed it.

P4 2.7GHz 1GB RAM, Win2K Pro SP4, ATI Radeon 9600. Not using BOINC screensaver, just a blank screen w/ PW. However I did take a peek at the cool graphics for a bit.

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Just downloaded and installed rosetta 5.12 tonight. Experienced a problem with unresponsive apps after letting PC sit idle for a while, but killing BOINC fixed it.

P4 2.7GHz 1GB RAM, Win2K Pro SP4, ATI Radeon 9600. Not using BOINC screensaver, just a blank screen w/ PW. However I did take a peek at the cool graphics for a bit.

Tom, you're new! Welcome! Sounds like there was a snag in this v5.12 which was just released. They are working on the problem and hope to have a fix (a new version) available in the next day or two.

In the meantime, you said ending BOINC fixed it, are you running any other BOINC projects? Or just Rosetta? I mean do you have experience using BOINC and other projects?

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

I was a longtime SETI@home fan a few years ago. I enjoyed watching my stats approach 99.5%. Then one summer I needed to shut computers off here at home while I was at work, to cut down on air conditioning costs. But I was recently intrigued when someone mentioned BOINC and the possibility of doing something in addition to looking for signs of alien life. :-) So I'm back. With some faster computers. :-)

After playing with this problem further, it appears that Rosetta and Predictor both exhibit this problem, whereas boincsimap, SETI and Einstein do not. I've been running the last two for about two weeks and hadn't noticed any problems. I just signed up for Rosetta, Predictor, and boincsimap tonight and started seeing the problem.

I used the suspend feature to force boinc to switch between projects. If either Rosetta or Predictor are running, I see the problem. boincmgr itself is not affected, so I can get in and suspend the project and see the results right away. Even taskmgr is hard to switch to!

The problem does not seem to occur on my little backup server - an eMachines 2.6GHz Celeron with 256MB RAM and on-board graphics running Win XP. I tried the graphics too.

HTH
Tom

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I can confirm the delay in video playback using media player classic while 5.12 is running. It doesn't appear to slow down any of my other apps. I also found that watching the graphics sometimes causes the video card to stop responding. Eventually things go back to normal with an error message from the driver (Catalyst version 5.13; ATI X850 XT) stating that the video card stopped responding to the driver. 4.7% into my current result, this happened 4 times in a row and by the fourth time, it had reverted to software rendering so I had to restart my machine.

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Rhiju already posted information on this, but we (ie, Rom) know what the problem is and I think Rhiju has already compiled with the previous Boinc app so the problem will gone soon. Rom explained to me on the phone why his error trapping addition to the Boinc API caused problems with certain not highly commercialized applications, but I didn't understand well enough to explain it! (I should point he is
adding this improved error trapping to help track down our few remaining problems).



It is probably the code I added for trapping messages to the debugger
viewport.

I'll make trapping debugger messages an optional thing that has to be turned
on in the registry.


----- Rom


-----Original Message-----
From: Rhiju Das
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 12:40 PM
To: Rom Walton
Cc: David Baker; David Kim
Subject: slowdowns?

Hi Rom:

We've been getting a lot of user complaints about the newest
rosetta apps causing severe slowdowns on people's computers in going
from 5.07 to 5.12. Some links below, and sample messages.

We haven't added any threads or objects from 5.07 to 5.12. I'm
trying to figure out whether our current work units are causing the
problem. But I also suspect that it could be something in the new
boinc api... can you think of any changes that might slow down a PC?

Cheers,
Rhiju

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=1562

http://ralph.bakerlab.org/forum_thread.php?id=203

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So that's the problem huh. No wonder my Windows Media Classic + ffdshow stopped when trying to open a video file, after the application is upgraded to 5.12. I nearly formatted the computer because of that.

I think this affect all DirectShow-based players because VLC has no problems with it.

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Campeones everywhere!

For history :
this morning the problem appeared on 2 other pcs, an p4 3.0@3.6 1GB ram and a A643200@2400MHz with 512MB ram.
my other 2 pcs are not affected yet.

It is NOT limited to video applications, because I don't use them, and I could repeatably hose my pc after a clean reboot with ralph suspended but other boinc projects running, by running ralph 5.12. Processes as vanilla as notepad took 1 minute to start (and the pc was not memory-starved), and at least one non-media app was badly broken. None of this is happening so far with ralph 5.13, so *big* thanks to Rom.

I hope he will put some details in his blog, because that vendor across the lake from the Rosetta lab will need spoon-feeding to make their app(s) less fragile.

It is NOT limited to video applications,

i confirm that, winamp, firefox, phtooshop acts the same. even windows explorrer is slowing down.

when do u believe that the 5.13 will be realeased for rosetta?

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A64 3500@2727MHz - A64 3200@2400MHz - P4 3.0 northy@3.6MHz
Sempron 2600+@2100MHz - Celeron 2.8 northy @3.6MHz
P4 2.4@2.8MHz - Celeron 2.66@3.0MHz - AthlonXP 2000+@1866MHz

Hi all: We just released 5.13, after testing on ralph today. Please continue to post here if you see any remaining issues.

It is NOT limited to video applications,

i confirm that, winamp, firefox, phtooshop acts the same. even windows explorrer is slowing down.

when do u believe that the 5.13 will be realeased for rosetta?

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5.12 interferes with online poker specifically with William Hill Application.

Causes application to hang and become unusable. Problem dissapears when I close BOINC or suspend Rosetta

I'm suspending any further work from Rosetta till this gets fixed.

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Things seem back to normal on 5.13 projects.

Thank you!
Danger's over.

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Things seem back to normal on 5.13 projects.

Thank you!
Danger's over.

The 5.12 issue also seemed to slow down my printing large documents from Word.

I am processing the remaining 5.12 units in one hour preference to clear them out, and then I will switch back to my normal 12 hour preference for the 5.13 units.

Thank you for fixing this problem so quickly! :)

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Regards,
Bob P.

Things seem back to normal on 5.13 projects.

Thank you!
Danger's over.

The 5.12 issue also seemed to slow down my printing large documents from Word.

I am processing the remaining 5.12 units in one hour preference to clear them out, and then I will switch back to my normal 12 hour preference for the 5.13 units.

Thank you for fixing this problem so quickly! :)

I do a lot of video editing and my linear editing programs were moving at a snails pace compared to normal while Rosetta/BOINC were running. I had to detach from Rosetta or shut down BOINC completely to get my normal cpu power back.