3)It is the local preferences...what I am doing is: open BOINC, choose Advanced>Preferences, click on the Processor Usage tab, and at the bottom where there SHOULD BE 3 choices in the Other Options area, "Use at most ____ % of CPU Time" is not present. It's not there. I'm not talking about it being greyed out...it's just not even there! That's the bizarre thing!




-Eric

I updated to 5.10.30 on four existing units and none are missing that option. I installed it on a machine that had not had BOINC on it before and that option is missing. Strange...

Ed, can you check your global_prefs.xml file to see if you have an entry like this (my cpu is set to 70%):

<cpu_usage_limit>70</cpu_usage_limit>

and...

in your global_prefs_override.xml file you should see (again mine is 70%):

<cpu_usage_limit>70.000000</cpu_usage_limit>


I'm guessing the problem is 1 of those 2 files or both files...or, some internal mapping inside the binary code of BOINC itself. *BUT* since an UPGRADE works, that would tell me that the binary is fine (and hence reading the XML files just fine) but that when a new fresh install is done, the XML file is not created correctly and hence, the binary doesn't see the XML entry and hence doesn't show it on the user interface.

Let us know if this line exists (or is missing) in the computer that has the problem.

I won't be able to check my "problem" computer until tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks.

-Eric

3)It is the local preferences...what I am doing is: open BOINC, choose Advanced>Preferences, click on the Processor Usage tab, and at the bottom where there SHOULD BE 3 choices in the Other Options area, "Use at most ____ % of CPU Time" is not present. It's not there. I'm not talking about it being greyed out...it's just not even there! That's the bizarre thing!




-Eric

You say the requirements haven't changed, but after the crash of a few weeks back, both of my 512mb machines stopped getting work because it said I didn't have enough memory. Once it got a work unit, it stopped after a while with a "waiting for memory" status. I look at the team stats for Primary Schools and see that RAC for everyone has dropped to the point that there is almost no activity. My guess is there IS no activity because of the memory requirements.

After an outage, it is normal for project servers to be overloaded trying to deliver work to everyone at once. BOINC's project code doesn't handle the different types of WUs very well and it becomes possible for the "short list" of available work to become depleted of "regular memory" work units. Possible, especially when under the stress of getting back up and running. This is why there was a period of time when you did not receive work. It was a very short-lived problem.

If your work was waiting for memory then BOINC is working trying to enforce your memory preferences as it runs. Others are saying it ignores these preferences. It has always been the case that some types of work use more memory then others, and some take longer to run then others. It has little to do with one Rosetta version over another.

I know the large WUs and large virtual memory requirements are causing some problems for some machines. But, rest assured, overall the results are looking good. I typically review the credit granted last 24hrs on the homepage. It has been near 60Tflops for some time now. Here is a chart. You can see the blimp when the server recovered from the outage and this throws off the scale, but the memory problems seem to be fairly limited in scope. Not that they are unimportant, but they are not as widespread as you fear.

Please post any problems with rosetta 5.89 here. Thanks!

So how does this version address the fact that the project doesn't function on machines with 256mb of memory, which is what your "System Requirements" page suggests?

Your statement is incorrect. The project runs on machines with 256MB of memory and the base system requirements have not changed. There are still tasks available for such systems.

Having said that, there are some people seeing large virtual memory requirements (which not specifically defined on the requirements page). Which BOINC should have detected and handled, but apparently did not. Which is why we have a thread such as this, to explain such observations that cannot be seen from the returning results.

The difference in memory requirements is due to the task being performed... not the specific version of Rosetta.

Please post any problems with rosetta 5.89 here. Thanks!

an hour or so ago the smaller memory units finally came pouring in.

Good! I can't get any on my low mem machines though - the last one said there was 266MB available and the WU required another 533MB! That WU is marked as an 800MB task then...

[EDIT] ah - just got some :D

11/30/2007 9:41:37 PM|rosetta@home|Message from server: Your computer has only 536330240 bytes of memory; workunit requires 263669760 more bytes
11/30/2007 9:41:37 PM|rosetta@home|Message from server: No work sent
11/30/2007 9:41:37 PM|rosetta@home|Message from server: (there was work but your computer doesn't have enough memory)

Until you see the message indicating that you are requesting xxx seconds of work, and not receiving any, the source of the problem is on the client side. Even with no debt, it may feel it has enough work from other projects to be busy.