Using BOINC 7.0.25 Windows XP Pro, intel dueal core processor, no GPU.

Recently I allowed BOINC to upgrade from version 6 to 7. Since then I have received no new tasks, from any of my 12 projects. The number of tasks has reduced to just two, neither of which is in any danger of running out of time, and neither of which is showing "high priority".

I have tried adding new projects, but that doesn't collect any tasks.

I have looked at the event log, and I have tried updating projects, but all I evder see is "not requesting new tasks". I do not see any error reports.

I have tried fiddling with options and preferences, just in case. No joy.

I have resynchronized with BOINCstatsBAM.

Now I am at a loss and any suggestions would be most welcome, else my BOINC will shortly be taskless.

(I see that BOINC 7 includes an Improved Client Scheduler, but this seems a rather drastic "improvement").

Sean.

Jord/Ageless explains this best here

Ageless wrote:

Do know, that the scheduling code has been rewritten from the ground up. It will not go and fetch work, or schedule which projects to run, as previous versions did.

[T]he new work fetch methods are now based on a low water mark and a high water mark.

BOINC won't immediately after uploading & reporting work ask for new work, but will only do so when it's past the low water mark.

E.g. if you wanted at least a day's worth of work:
In 6.12 and before, you'd set connect to interval to 0.01 and additional work to 1.0

In 7.0 you set minimum work buffer to 1.0 and max additional work buffer to 0.01

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Many thanks. I will experiment.

It seems I have one WU which takes a long time to complete (Climate Prediction) and one (Test4Theory) which has (as I write) over half a day to go; in the past other shorter tasks would come and go, leaving the longer ones still to finish before the deadline.

It looks to me as if now the quicker to finish tasks aren't going to get a look in, or have I misunderstood?

Sean.

you will get other tasks from other projects - just give it time

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I have the same problem with version 7. Each task would complete, but BOINC Manager would not request new ones. I do not consider myself stupid, but the explanation of the parameters for minimum and maximum work buffers in the network preferences is VERY difficult to understand. It should not take a genius to determine the implications of these settings. After trying a setting, I now have gone from zero to 16 tasks of World Community Grid and one of Malariacontrol.net.

That means that out of my 6 projects, only three (including climateprediction) will operate for the next week and a half until WCG tasks are flushed.

Version 7 seems like a downgrade to me. Is there any way to flush version 7 and reinstall version 6?

Bernie

Well I held on and I didnt afdjust any preferences. Just before finishing it's Test4Theory BOINC has just downloaded seven malariacontrol.net tasks. The total estimated time to completion means there' shouldn't be enough time for them all to finish before the deadline, so nothing else would get a chance (as it happens, the tasks seems to actually be runing much quicker than the estimate).

BOINC 6 seemed to run quite nicely for me, not many tasks failed to complete and it did a nice variety of work. The jury here is still out on BOINC 7. I'll wait a few more days before I start tinkering with preferences.

Sean.

I have the same problem with version 7. Each task would complete, but BOINC Manager would not request new ones. I do not consider myself stupid, but the explanation of the parameters for minimum and maximum work buffers in the network preferences is VERY difficult to understand.

Is normal situation, for all.
The old BOINC would do work requests almost whenever it felt like it, but with BOINC 7.0 it'll wait until you reach the minimum buffer as set through the "Minimum work buffer" value. This does mean that when there's a couple of tasks in the list that have totally wrong estimates as how long they'll take, say some Seti Astropulse with an estimate of 145 hours, but they only run for 6... that BOINC can reach bottom with only as many tasks in cache as you have hardware (CPU + GPU) cores.

But anyway, the old BOINC did a "connect to" + additional work. The "connect to" was the interval with which BOINC would contact projects, while the additional work value was what extra cache you wanted. This didn't work too well, for a lot of reasons.

With BOINC 7.0 this has been changed to a Minimum work buffer + Maximum additional work buffer. Which do exactly what they say on the tin... at least when your BOINC does one project.

There's a bug in the software that sometimes rears its ugly head when more than 2 projects are attached and allowed to fetch work. As I understand it it's a difficult bug to track, and there's even the thing that when you leave BOINC well alone, eventually, after a week or what, it'll fix itself.

But you have to leave BOINC alone anyway, since this version of BOINC uses a totally new, from the ground up rewritten CPU and GPU scheduler plus work fetch module. These cannot be compared to BOINC 6's versions, they use their own values in the code and the program, which is one the reason why when you move over to 7.0 you can't easily return to 6.xx, and are the main reason why this BOINC reacts differently from previous versions.

BOINC 7 will have to learn all over again about the project's applications, their different run times, how different the estimates are from reality etc. This will take a week or more. Depends on how much your machine is on and when BOINC is allowed to do work on CPU and if applicable GPU.

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Thanks Ageless for the clear and helpful explanation.

Sean.

FWIW, today the 7.0.25 scheduler running on a Windows XP host wouldn't get new work even when it had fewer tasks than cores. The host runs BOINC 24/7 , has had no problems, was upgraded from 6 to 7 yesterday. Forcing a project update yielded only "not requesting work", no matter how much buffer I requested.

I finally reset the (host-specific) buffer settings to their original values, verified the client would still not request work, then restarted the client. It immediately requested work to satisfy the number of available cores.

This does not seem right to me, no matter what it needs to learn about run times and estimates. It doesn't appear to be the aforementioned bug, as currently only one BOINC project is allowed to fetch work on this host.

This does not seem right to me, no matter what it needs to learn about run times and estimates. It doesn't appear to be the aforementioned bug, as currently only one BOINC project is allowed to fetch work on this host.

Please follow the instructions in this post and then as it requests paste your output into a new thread.

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BOINC 7 will have to learn all over again about the project's applications, their different run times, how different the estimates are from reality etc. This will take a week or more. Depends on how much your machine is on and when BOINC is allowed to do work on CPU

Yes, well that's all well and good. But if BOINC7 is not loading WUs for any more than 1 project, how is to going to learn how they others behave? I've set BOINC to keep work for 3 days and an extra 4, but it has its own opinion of the need.

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squeak

I've set BOINC to keep work for 3 days and an extra 4, but it has its own opinion of the need.

What about 4 days and extra 3 or 5+2 or 6+1 or 6.9+0.1?

Gruß,
Gundolf

Huh? Or should I say bitte? Are you serious?

I guess I could spend the next week trying every possible combination of parameters, but generally someone testing something likes to have a particular hypothesis to prove or disprove, and testing computer systems generally involves boundary value or specific values based on an understanding of the behaviour of the subject. Also generally you have a something which appears to work but you are trying to break it.

In this case, BOINC is clearly not responding to what I've told it, so it is already broken, and there are no clues as to what changes should be applied to make to work. Typically in problem diagnosis, you look for the root cause, rather than randomly pick alternative inputs in the hope that it might work.

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squeak

My primary BOINC machine is a laptop which is intermittently online, sometimes it goes a day or two without connecting to the net, so it needs a reasonably large buffer. However, each time it fills the buffer, it seems to load work units from just one project. BOINC 6 always had a nice variety running, BOINC 7 is boring. I'd really like to spread my cycles around.

OK, I know this is not a popular answer, but IME without adding any new projects to the mix - after running for about a week (24/7) the new 7 series BOINC gets its bearings - it will have cycled through most of your projects and gotten a "feel for things" - then adjusting min & max buffers is "more" predictable. I find that after a period of time the 7 series client rotates through the minority projects better than the 6 series ever did, it also seems to pickup work from intermittent projects like simap and lhc 1 better than the 6 series ever did.

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It hasn't settled down at all, I'm afraid. A couple of months in and my BOINC is now stuck on one project only. I have changed nothing.

All my projects excepting one have a "scheduling priority" of 0.0. World Community Grid, the only project for which I've had any work for some weeks, has a scheduling priority of -1001.04.

What does this mean, and how can I persuade my new BOINC to share my CPU cycles more fairly?

Thanks,

Sean.

Hi,

my pc is not able to get work. The screen saver says: no running tasks. I got the seti@home project only. Is it normal? Can anyone help me please?

Thank you.

Hi,

my pc is not able to get work. The screen saver says: no running tasks. I got the seti@home project only. Is it normal? Can anyone help me please?

Thank you.

From the front page of the Setiathome project:

Science Database Updates
We are attempting some updates to the master science database. This may mean a workunit shortage over the next day or so after we come back on line later this afternoon from our usual Tuesday outage. 10 Jul 2012 | 16:03:33 UTC

If you're having trouble getting work from a project, it's best that you ask at that project.

Claggy

There's a bug in the software that sometimes rears its ugly head when more than 2 projects are attached and allowed to fetch work. As I understand it it's a difficult bug to track, and there's even the thing that when you leave BOINC well alone, eventually, after a week or what, it'll fix itself.

I think this might be related. I did some testing:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=68453&temp_sort_style=5

If I have a lot of CPU units in my cache from non-SETI projects, then my GPU cache of SETI workunits shrinks to only a day or two's worth. If I disable work fetch on all other projects, my SETI cache grows to enough for nearly a week.

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You will be assimilated...bunghole!

Coming to this since I'm having the same problem - and have been, for some weeks.

SETI and a couple of other projects no longer fetch work, although some others do. It all worked fine until a few weeks ago.
I've tried all the suggestions on here, with no effect.

Is there a way to tell BOINC on my PC to request work?

If I click "Update", then I get a report that
02/09/2012 18:22:46 | SETI@home | update requested by user
02/09/2012 18:22:49 | SETI@home | Sending scheduler request: Requested by user.
02/09/2012 18:22:49 | SETI@home | Not reporting or requesting tasks
02/09/2012 18:22:52 | SETI@home | Scheduler request completed

- and no work.

What am I doing wrong?

Keith