Hi All,

Been running Rosetta for a while and now encountering serious issues with near-endless or endless loops.
Normal running time is 6 hours on a task. And half of the WU's seem to adhere to that, however the other half is showing some weird behaviour :
1. Running forever without any estimated time left, going on for 20+ hours
as an example : nkid_1_3_2016_final3_0716_00058_0043.pdb343_TG_dez_fold_SAVE_ALL_OUT_322141_663_0
nkid_1_3_2016_final3_0692_00366_0042.pdb342_TG_dez_fold_SAVE_ALL_OUT_322134_678_0

2. Running forever, but with an estimated time left which keeps creeping up.
don't have examples here, I aborted them after 25+ hours of running.

This appears on a laptop. On my desktop, it seems to work well. Although I have other issues there with the scheduling of Rosetta.

Could you please investigate ?

Many thanks in advance !

Kind Regards,

B.E.

A few things to consider:

Where did you set your preferences? Changes made in the BOINC Manager will override any web-based settings.

Double check the wording. In my version of BOINC Manager a box must be checked to keep tasks running while the computer is in use while you must select the “no” radio button to achieve the same thing using web-based prefs.

What I'm puzzled about is that BOINC is starting new tasks when older ones still are Waiting to Run...

This can happen if there isn’t enough memory to continue running a particular task. BOINC will set that one aside and try another. Rosetta tasks are among the most memory hungry tasks you will encounter in the BOINC world. So how much memory per core do you have and, more importantly, how much is BOINC allowed to use?

Could computer (not BOINC) sleep/hibernation settings be coming into play?

Thanks Snags - useful input. I have used local settings and the option window confirms that it's using those (it has a button to use prefs from the web but I haven't clicked that)

PC is a quad core with 12GB RAM, but it's running several large java-based services so memory typically runs around 80-90% used but with very little swapping. However as I'm not using the largest of those services most days I've now stopped that (releasing around 4GB) and will only run it when I need to access it. Rosetta tasks are usually under 200MB each in task manager so that should now mean there's plenty of memory available.

Making previously suggested changes seems to have improved things somewhat (only one overdue task waiting this morning) so I'll see if the latest change does any better.

I saw you had 12Gb RAM so didn't expect RAM to be an issue, but now I read this it is likely to have been a factor. My 8 concurrent tasks typically contribute 1.5GB out of 6.5Gb RAM in use, but I have 16Gb RAM total to utilise.

A few things to consider:

Where did you set your preferences? Changes made in the BOINC Manager will override any web-based settings.

Double check the wording. In my version of BOINC Manager a box must be checked to keep tasks running while the computer is in use while you must select the “no” radio button to achieve the same thing using web-based prefs.

What I'm puzzled about is that BOINC is starting new tasks when older ones still are Waiting to Run...

This can happen if there isn’t enough memory to continue running a particular task. BOINC will set that one aside and try another. Rosetta tasks are among the most memory hungry tasks you will encounter in the BOINC world. So how much memory per core do you have and, more importantly, how much is BOINC allowed to use?

Could computer (not BOINC) sleep/hibernation settings be coming into play?

Best,
Snags

I'm finding that although some tasks complete OK, many more go "waiting to run" and seem to stay that way. I've aborted those that are clearly long past their deadline date but the others just sit there with varying % done and elapsed times. Is this normal? I'd have expected long-past-deadline tasks to be dropped and cleaned up by BOINC (but maybe that takes longer than a week?)Or is there something weird about my PC?

Any advice would be welcome.

Thanks in advance.
Steve

Waiting to run only applies when other projects are prioritised ahead of Rosetta, but I notice your only other project is Malaria which has been out of tasks for some while, so I'm wondering if you have "suspend when computer is in use" checked in OptionsComputing Preferences. This should be unchecked.

Hi,

I'm finding that although some tasks complete OK, many more go "waiting to run" ...

Waiting to run is not a flaw in a task. It simply means that the BOINC Manager has decided to run something else first. Sounds like perhaps you have several projects running and the BOINC Manager is still getting used to the mix and may have download too much work.

As to the deadlines you mentioned, yes the BOINC Manager attempts to run tasks that are in risk of missing their deadlines first. And once the deadline has passed, you may as well "abort" the task. But once things settle in, this should not happen.

Does your machine run BOINC on a fairly regular schedule? How many hours per day?