From the list...


From David Anderson

Late-breaking news! I found out what the problem is,
and will check in a fix later today.
It affects all projects, not just E@h.
It can be fixed in the core client (no app changes).

Thanks to Kathryn M and others who reported this.
This is the kind of bug that would be hard to
find without alpha testing.

I installed the 5.7.5 beta code on 5 machines this morning and so far it seems to be working well! I am not seeing the problems with work units stalling that I was seeing in 5.7.2-5.7.4. Thanks BOINC development team!

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I installed the 5.7.5 beta code on 5 machines this morning and so far it seems to be working well! I am not seeing the problems with work units stalling that I was seeing in 5.7.2-5.7.4. Thanks BOINC development team!

Is this with the throttling?

That's working for me now as well.

The only other bug I've come across (and a few other testers as well) is that it doesn't want to seem to stay in snooze mode.

Yes, I'm running with throttling set to 80%....no problems so far. I have not tried snooze mode yet....I've read it comes out of snooze mode after 1 minute. Is this the problem?

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Yes, I'm running with throttling set to 80%....no problems so far. I have not tried snooze mode yet....I've read it comes out of snooze mode after 1 minute. Is this the problem?

Yup. A few people have reported the 1 minute thing with snooze.

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Kathryn :o)

I installed the 5.7.5 beta code on 5 machines this morning and so far it seems to be working well! I am not seeing the problems with work units stalling that I was seeing in 5.7.2-5.7.4. Thanks BOINC development team!

Is this with the throttling?

That's working for me now as well - fantatstic. I've been waiting a long time for this, as my main PC is a laptop.

The only other bug I've come across (and a few other testers as well) is that it doesn't want to seem to stay in snooze mode.

Same for me on Win ZP. Throttling now works fine, tried a few settings in 20-60% range. Just keeps on ticking, with both Einstein and Rosetta tasks. Rosetta used to also "hang" easily within a few minutes if graphics were enabled, had to end the BOINC program via task manager to get out of that. Now runs fine. I'll add that to the Rosetta discussions -Einstein site seems offline right now but I'll go there after also.

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Ravensview.

If you aren't already subscribed to the alpha test list, you might want to do that as well. You can report stuff directly to the developers.


Einstein is down right now because of a file system problem. See the Albert thread in this forum.

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Kathryn :o)

One interesting side effect of the method of throttling (short on/off times) is with the screensaver on dual core computers. Because each core can be running a different task, when the screensaver activates, it continually switches between the two screensavers associated with the two tasks. The effect is say Seti screensaver for 1 second, then Einstein for one second.
Interesting............

Mike P

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I cannot install boinc 5.7.5 or 5.7.4 on my computer.
WinXP home, fully patched
administrator rights

After double clicking on the exe-file for installation, everything works fine. The installer asks for the installation directory and the mode boinc should run. After that it starts the installation and gives an erroro message that it cannot find boinc.msi
It is assumed to be under c:\\windows\\downloaded installations\\{crytic numbers}\\boinc.msi
The subdirectory with the cryptic numbers does not exist but a different cryptic one with correct date and time. Switching to that directory gives the same error message (The file ..boinc.msi is not a valid installation package for the product BOINC.) Even copying the msi file to a different folder or downloading the installer with IE instead of firefox lead to the same error message.

Any ideas?

Any ideas?

- Try using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to delete any old BOINC. It's probably in the list as BOINC or as a corrupt name.

- Try to reboot the computer before installing BOINC again.

- Try reinstalling the old BOINC you have/had on your system, then immediately install the new version on top of it. (If old version was 4.19 or before, it needs to be uninstalled first, through add/remove programs).

- If attempting a service install, make sure your Windows Administrator has a password. BOINC cannot be installed with a blank password.

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- Try using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to delete any old BOINC. It's probably in the list as BOINC or as a corrupt name.

This solved my problem. Thank you.

I hope that it is appropriate for me to post this here.

I downloaded 5.7.5 today and haven't ran into many problems. However, I've noticed a few quirks. BOINC does not acknowledge that it's pausing a task before it starts a new one...although it's really paused and listed as preempted in the task tab.

Note the following...BOINC restarts SETI but never states that it's pausing it before starting Riesel Sieve. (not shown but further down it starts PrimGrid without stating that it's pausing Riesel Sieve.) Both SETI and Riesel Sieve had not finished their WUs.

11/26/2006 12:33:17 AM|SETI@home|Restarting task 05jn03aa.29008.23072.534648.3.101_2 using setiathome_enhanced version 515
11/26/2006 12:33:19 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Started upload of file riesel-llr_39309_0.out
11/26/2006 12:33:25 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Finished upload of file riesel-llr_39309_0.out
11/26/2006 12:33:25 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Throughput 1266 bytes/sec
11/26/2006 12:49:30 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Sending scheduler request: To report completed tasks
11/26/2006 12:49:30 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Requesting 299 seconds of new work, and reporting 6 completed tasks
11/26/2006 12:49:41 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Scheduler RPC succeeded [server version 512]
11/26/2006 12:49:43 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Started download of file wu_llr27.txt
11/26/2006 12:49:45 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Finished download of file wu_llr27.txt
11/26/2006 12:49:45 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Throughput 331 bytes/sec
11/26/2006 12:49:46 AM||Starting riesel-llr_27_13
11/26/2006 12:49:46 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Starting task riesel-llr_27_13 using llr version 515
11/26/2006 12:55:10 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Computation for task riesel-llr_27_13 finished

Also, I noticed that if I suspend a project while it's working on a task, although it will state preempted, it continues to run. A new project will start up and I'll have two projects running as noted in the task manager...both taking 50% of the CPU.

Lastly, I had to manually edit the client_state and client_state_prev to remove references to seti 4.11. BOINC deleted it and then attempted to download it...but of course it was not there. Updating to 5.15 made SETI work again but BOINC kept looking for 4.11 until I edited it out of the client_state and client_state_prev files.

My computer specs are as follows:

11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM||Starting BOINC client version 5.7.5 for windows_intelx86
11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM||log flags: task, file_xfer, sched_ops
11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM||Libraries: libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8a zlib/1.2.3
11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM||Data directory: C:\\Program Files\\BOINC
11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM|Riesel Sieve Project|Found app_info.xml; using anonymous platform
11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM||Processor: 1 AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3400+
11/26/2006 12:14:34 AM||Memory: 1.25 GB physical, 2.10 GB virtual

Note the following...BOINC restarts SETI but never states that it's pausing it before starting Riesel Sieve.

It shows it in the Tasks tab, which according to the developers is enough.
If you want more messaging, use http://boinc.berkeley.edu/client_msgs.php for that.

Also, I noticed that if I suspend a project while it's working on a task, although it will state preempted, it continues to run. A new project will start up and I'll have two projects running as noted in the task manager...both taking 50% of the CPU.

You're lucky then. ;-)
For me it was showing the project as suspended, another running, where the project I had suspended was taking up all the CPU cycles as I only have one CPU. Thanks for confirming the bug, though. :-)

Things like that are best posted on the Alpha email list as the latter is a real bug. The list needs registration.

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I just upgraded to 5.7.5 on Mac OSX Intel Core Duo.
I notice one change from the previous version: the time to completion for waiting WU's keeps increasing and is now nearly twice what the actual times are. In the previous version, these times would be gradually decreasing, approaching the actual times.

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I just upgraded to 5.7.5 on Mac OSX Intel Core Duo.
I notice one change from the previous version: the time to completion for waiting WU's keeps increasing and is now nearly twice what the actual times are. In the previous version, these times would be gradually decreasing, approaching the actual times.

What project(s)?

Do your benchmarks look ok? (Although I'm not sure if bad benchmarks would impact time to completion not counting down.)

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Kathryn :o)

I've just installed BOINC 5.7.5 on my computer. I'm having problems running Winamp while BOINC is in the background. Music sounds crappy and annoying, it's like playing in slow mo. I didn't experience this problem with the previous client. I have the following system:

CPU: Intel Pentium D 3.4GHz
Memory: 1024MB (DDR2, 533MHz)
Free Memory (while running BOINC and Winamp): 300MB
Page File: 2500MB
OS: Windows XP SP2
BOINC Manager: version 5.7.5
Project: World Community Grid
CPU Usage: 100% (for both cores)
Application: hpf2 5.15, hdc 5.14

Should I set the maximum number of processors to one?

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What are you playing on WinAmp?

I'm running the latest WinAmp version right now, while Boinc is crunching. No problem. Streaming music directly from Club 977.

Also, my WinAmp isn't taking any CPU cycles, so you may want to check in Task Manager what else is running. And of course, if you are playing music from the same hard drive as Boinc runs on, do know that Boinc writes to disk quite regularly, so it might be in the way.

P.S: you only have 300MB memory left? How much is WCG taking up then?

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I'm playing MP3s from a separate drive. Winamp version is 5.3.

Nothing else is running in the background and BOINC is using 100% of both cores. I have no problem listening to Winamp when BOINC is running a combination of hdc and fcg1. It only happens when it's running hdc and hpf2.

WCG is using 284,000K each for hdc and hpf2. Peak memory usage of hdc was 690,000K.

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And your Windows page file is set to what amount? Is it dynamic (Can grow when it wants to)?

Look, having 1GB of memory and Windows XP means that when XP boots up it grabs all that memory, then releases parts of it for applications, programs and whatnot. So even with 300MB showing "free", you have to add Windows to the sum. And it runs in a minimum of 256MB. So you have even less memory really free (or running from the page file).

Try running it with one CPU, see what that does.
Or add more memory. XP can gobble up up to 4GB (an amount most motherboards can't take, though).

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I grabbed the data below from Windows Task Manager while running BOINC (hdc and fcg1):


Processes
wcg_hdc_tma...Mem Usage: 299,880K, Peak Mem Usage: 678,752K, VM Size: 299,608K
wcg_fcg1_...Mem Usage: 14,488K, Peak Mem Usage: 14,980K, VM Size: 31,584K
vsmon.exe (ZoneAlarm Suite)...Mem Usage: 51,264K, Peak Mem Usage, 218,375K, VM Size: 54,988K

Performance
Totals: Handles-10957, Threads-409, Processes-36
Commit Charge (K): Total-704,252, Limit-2,517,960, Peak-1,357,704
Physical Memory (K): Total-1,046,548, Available-355,756, System Cache-381,012

Yes, I guess my page file is dynamic (I've set it at 3,145,728K and Windows is only using 1,572,864K).

I don't experience any problem with some combinations of WCG applications except running hdc and hpf2 at the same time. It does not happen when I use only one CPU or both CPUs with other applications.

I'll try adding memory, :-). Luckily, my current motherboard supports 4GB.

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