Irritation.

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adrianxw
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Re: Irritation.

#13 Ungelesener Beitrag von adrianxw » 18.06.2017 14:03

Understood.

adrianxw
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Re: Irritation.

#14 Ungelesener Beitrag von adrianxw » 30.06.2017 15:08

I had to reboot the machine, and what happens, the RNA job crashes, not the other tasks that were running, just the RNA, 2,382,817.05 seconds in to the job, "computation error", really disappointing. I'm sorry, but that indicates to me that the tasks are too fragile. Detatching from the project.

Jacob Klein
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Re: Irritation.

#15 Ungelesener Beitrag von Jacob Klein » 30.06.2017 15:32

Sorry yours ended prematurely.

They definitely require a lot of care, and are fragile!

When I need to shutdown or restart, I make sure to:
- Suspend BOINC
- Monitor Task Manager until VBoxHeadless.exe stops using CPU
- Exit BOINC
- Monitor Task Manager until boinc.exe exits gracefully
- Then I can shutdown or restart Windows

Also, your CPU time was only 27 days :) One of the tasks took my laptop ~556 days CPU time to complete. Fun stuff.
One day the VirtualBox tasks will be more robust, but today is not that day.

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Re: Irritation.

#16 Ungelesener Beitrag von adrianxw » 30.06.2017 21:15

Thats fine, perhaps for you. The whole BOINC ethic is to be simple and transparent, fit it and forget it, NOT, every time I need to do something stupid with my machine because a printer won't work, I have to stop and have a serious think about what is going to happen if I do this. Am I going to wait months for a job to finish so that I can print a travel document I MIGHT need in 8 days time?

The task was overly fragile. After so long running, I am annoyed, RNA has been removed from my list of projects across my machines.

Jacob Klein
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Re: Irritation.

#17 Ungelesener Beitrag von Jacob Klein » 30.06.2017 21:21

I agree that BOINC VM tasks are currently fragile. And I'm stating that the current set of RNA World VM tasks, which are all monsters, require a serious babysitting commitment, in order to finish successfully. It is what it is. Sorry.

I am able to restart my PC whenever I want, while safely working on the monster RNA World VM tasks, by doing the steps that I described.

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Michael H.W. Weber
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Re: Irritation.

#18 Ungelesener Beitrag von Michael H.W. Weber » 01.07.2017 04:22

I beg to differ, but there is nothing fragile about anything in RNA World.

Like with all the other Virtualbox-based BOINC projects, you just need to take care that the writing process of a snapshot is completed if and before you want to restart your machine. And that is indeed easily managed by just exiting BOINC manually and taking a look at the task manager to ensure that CPU and RAM usage have gone down BEFORE you order a restart of the system. And again: As it is mandatory for the other Virtulbx projects, too.

The difference is - and that is why you are supposed to be really careful when shutting down your machine with an RNA World VM task (please also note that this is just ONE and usually rather rare type of RNA World tasks from which you may als simpley opt-out in the project settings): IF something goes wrong, you may loose not just a day of work but a few weeks or even months.

Michael.

P.S.: If you really like to enjoy a problematic project, try Duchamps and run more than 2 tasks on an 8 GB system. Although the memory usage is not worth to mention, you will enjoy a system "slideshow". This really is a "pain in the butt". :wink:
Fördern, kooperieren und konstruieren statt fordern, konkurrieren und konsumieren.

http://signature.statseb.fr I: Kaputte Seite A
http://signature.statseb.fr II: Kaputte Seite B

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gemini8
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Re: Irritation.

#19 Ungelesener Beitrag von gemini8 » 01.07.2017 06:59

I don't need to search for other slideshow projects while already running GPU tasks on my 2010 MacBook Pro which doesn't let me choose the option of halting a task when keyboard or mouse are touched.
Gruß, Jens
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Lowend-User und Teilzeit-Cruncher

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adrianxw
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Re: Irritation.

#20 Ungelesener Beitrag von adrianxw » 01.07.2017 12:36

When I restart the machine, I expect the task to restart from the last checkpoint. This, it did, and ran for perhaps two minutes, then crashed. You say it is not flaky, I beg to differ. I have other virtualbox projects on here, yet it was only this one that crashes. The program IS to sensitive. I have removed the project from my machines.

And I do run duchamp, if you set it to use say 25% of CPU's it presents no problems at all.

Jacob Klein
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Re: Irritation.

#21 Ungelesener Beitrag von Jacob Klein » 01.07.2017 14:18

The DuChamp problems involving over-committing memory, is (to my knowledge) a BOINC problem (if the app version is properly configured by the project). I believe BOINC 7.7.x has a preliminary fix for it, in alpha testing.

The VM problems, where sometimes a VM task will not exit gracefully, or worse will not start gracefully, is (to my knowledge) a BOINC VM Wrapper problem. Work on that has been on hold for a while, as the main developer (Rom) got settled into a new job. However, even if he does work on it more frequently now, there are no known *easily-reproducible* problems with it. The VirtualBox BOINC VM Wrapper is just a bit fragile still, and as I said, requires babysitting to ensure it all goes well.

I do weekly backups of RNA World VMs, and typically have to "restore from backup" (losing up to a week of work, in order to not waste 40-80 weeks of work) on maybe 1 out of every 4 RNA World VM tasks. Such is the nature of the beast, at least from my experience. One day, I might put more effort to describe how I do backups, but it involves really advanced steps, for experts only.

I enjoy the challenge of RNA World VM monsters. It's something I could never do when they weren't running in VMs.

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