Is this a weekend?

[altivo]

Tomorrow I have to put in what amounts to a full day at the gallery, demonstrating and just watching. But then I'm done until the last day when we have to pick up our entries and help break down the show.

So far only two responses to my invitation for other fursuiters to join me at the library on November 15 (the eve of MFF) to help entertain at a family reading night party. Neither seems able to make it in time, alas. For anyone on my friends list who plans to arrive at the Hyatt on Thursday before 4pm or so, my boss is offering dinner to you if you are willing to make a fursuit appearance that evening from 6:30 to about 8 pm. I am willing to run shuttle from the Hyatt up to Harvard for the event, and then return you to Schaumburg after.

Hee. I've made it onto the top page of rankings for returns to the us_furries team on WCG/BOINC. Look out, cabcat, I'm creeping up on you from below. But... I'm probably slowing down. The Pentium III machines I've been running are just not reliable enough. For some reason, the BOINC software tends to stall on them. It doesn't lose results, but it can lose hours of time until I notice and restart them. I'm not interested in constantly riding herd on these machines, so the most troublesome ones are going to be dropped once they finish the result sets they currently hold. The most reliable pluggers are the two Alpha processors, which may be slower but they never quit or stall. They just keep chugging along like the tortoise in that famous race... The largest point counts come from the two Pentium 4 class machines, of course, but they require more fiddling as well to keep them going.

Comments

[corelog.livejournal.com]

Seems odd that your Pentium-class machines keep stalling. All your machines appear to be using Linux, so I'm guessing you're still using the packaged BOINC versions? Have you considered upgrading them to the latest stable Linux x86 version (5.8.16)? It should be a simple matter of running the self-extractor, which creates a BOINC/ folder in the current directory, then copying the contents of that folder into your current BOINC installation. You won't lose any work or stats.

Just a thought, of course. I'm perplexed by stalling daemons like that, unless something else is suddenly competing for their CPU time. I've certainly never experienced it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nope, the Pentiums are all running the 5.8.16 self-extracting package. Only the Alphas are running Debian and using the packaged version, which is apparently the latest one that has been verified for Alpha processors.

The stalling is weird. No error is recorded in the messages or logs. But what happens is that either a task completes and then the next one isn't started or a task completes and nothing more gets downloaded. In both cases, this can be fixed by stopping the daemon and restarting it. I thought at first it was a no work available situation, but that appears not to be the cause. Often there will be one or more result sets already in progress, and boincmgr shows them "Waiting to run" but it isn't running them. No, the aren't suspended or aborted or anything like that.

Yesterday I did have one showing a status of "Waiting for memory" which didn't make sense either, since nothing else was running on the machine and vmstat indicated that only half the real memory and about 10% of the virtual memory was in use. Nothing would budge that one. I finally canceled it and took the machine offline.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I would have responded to the invitation but I wanted to talk about it with Jay first. As it is, we are unsure that we would arrive in time. Due to the variable nature of his schedule, our departure time (and thus arrival time) cannot be guaranteed.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I can understand that. While I think Orvan would be a hit at this event, I didn't really think you could make it. However, as the day approaches, if it looks more workable then let me know and I'll provide directions, etc. You could stop in Harvard on the way to Schaumburg if your reservation is guaranteed for late arrival. We're practically in your path.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Creeping up on me from below? How kinky ;)

I hate to tell you but the one P4 machine, the Dual core P4
and the old AMDXP machine all run Windows and hardware as tuned by el Gato ;)
No failures so far :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Like so much software today, BOINC was obviously written with Windows in mind. No surprise, given that Microsloth accounts for such a massive market share. So I'm not surprised that it would run well on Windows, though I expect it performs best there when the machine is otherwise idle. Windows generally does not share resources between tasks as efficiently as 'NIX style systems.

The Linux BOINC client does seem to have a problem sometimes with running for weeks on end without being restarted. Somewhere along the line it corrupts something in its own management information and gets confused. Then it either aborts all tasks or refuses to download any new work until it is restarted. Certainly that's not a problem with Linux, as I've had Linux servers run for nearly two years without rebooting or locking up.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I don't use Boinc :) I just use the standard WCA grid agent

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's supposedly going away. They're converting everything to BOINC.

I'd run WCG stuff on my Alpha processors except they don't have a client for Alpha at all. As far as I can tell so far, only SETI@Home has bothered with support for the Alpha, even though the bigger ones are tremendous number crunchers and there are a lot of them out there in use.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Did you like my naming conventions? :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't know how to see them. WCG doesn't let me view your individual machine stats, and you're apparently not on boincstats.com.

Let me guess... automobiles?

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

That'd be far too predictable :) My main computer has always been named Solair, the rest are named as geni and rhyming versions :)
Lupine, Supine, Vulpine, Lapine.