Memory Usage

[sorceress]

How much memory are these new units going to require? I was up to 680mb and climbing. I only have 1gb on my laptop and the other WU were hanging, waiting for memory. Ihad to abort the unit.

[Torbjörn Klatt]

Unfortunately it is not really possible to forecast the memory usage of the RNA World work units. But they are well known for a rather huge demand of memory (there have been some - and not rarely - around with significantly more than 2GB). On the other hand and as your computer has got only 1GB available, the very big ones should not be sent out to you.

To what maximum amount of memory usage did you set your local BOINC client? Are you running UNIX and if so, how much is BOINC allowed to use the swap? In your case with a setting of "use at most 90% of memory", BOINC will suspend the running tasks when the BOINC tasks are using more than 900MB of memory.

Cheers,
Torbjoern

[sorceress]

Unfortunately it is not really possible to forecast the memory usage of the RNA World work units. But they are well known for a rather huge demand of memory (there have been some - and not rarely - around with significantly more than 2GB). On the other hand and as your computer has got only 1GB available, the very big ones should not be sent out to you.

To what maximum amount of memory usage did you set your local BOINC client? Are you running UNIX and if so, how much is BOINC allowed to use the swap? In your case with a setting of "use at most 90% of memory", BOINC will suspend the running tasks when the BOINC tasks are using more than 900MB of memory.

Cheers,
Torbjoern

I am running WinXP Pro32. I have 1gb memory and the usage set at 100% since the laptop is used only for DC projects. My main computer has the same OS but 4gb so it is not a problem with the larger memory requirements. The laptop was doing fine untill the new WUs arrived. I have suspended RNA on it until I can add more memory.

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Unfortunately it is not really possible to forecast the memory usage of the RNA World work units. But they are well known for a rather huge demand of memory (there have been some - and not rarely - around with significantly more than 2GB). On the other hand and as your computer has got only 1GB available, the very big ones should not be sent out to you.

To what maximum amount of memory usage did you set your local BOINC client? Are you running UNIX and if so, how much is BOINC allowed to use the swap? In your case with a setting of "use at most 90% of memory", BOINC will suspend the running tasks when the BOINC tasks are using more than 900MB of memory.

Cheers,
Torbjoern

I am running WinXP Pro32. I have 1gb memory and the usage set at 100% since the laptop is used only for DC projects. My main computer has the same OS but 4gb so it is not a problem with the larger memory requirements. The laptop was doing fine untill the new WUs arrived. I have suspended RNA on it until I can add more memory.

You did well but should keep in mind one important thing: Your OS is using part of your physical RAM. So, you should never set the BOINC-allowed memory to 100% of what you physically have. Windows XP Pro for exampe requires a little less than 100 MB on its own, so with that OS, your maximum RAM allowance for BOINC would be at best 900 MB - better only 800 MB. With such settings, you should not run into problems, because you will not receive WUs requiring more than 800 MB.

Michael.

[sorceress]

I am running WinXP Pro32. I have 1gb memory and the usage set at 100% since the laptop is used only for DC projects. My main computer has the same OS but 4gb so it is not a problem with the larger memory requirements. The laptop was doing fine untill the new WUs arrived. I have suspended RNA on it until I can add more memory.

You did well but should keep in mind one important thing: Your OS is using part of your physical RAM. So, you should never set the BOINC-allowed memory to 100% of what you physically have. Windows XP Pro for exampe requires a little less than 100 MB on its own, so with that OS, your maximum RAM allowance for BOINC would be at best 900 MB - better only 800 MB. With such settings, you should not run into problems, because you will not receive WUs requiring more than 800 MB.

Michael.

Hmmm.. so if I set my memory usage to say 80% on my laptop, I can still run RNA in the chance I may get a WU with a lesser memory requirement? Is the memory usage setting in BOINC used to determine which WU to download? Or will it download whatever is in the pipe then lock up my other WUs while it tries to process the large RNA WU? I would rather suspend RNA on the laptop than have it delay my other WUs. But if BOINC is 'selective' in what WU to d/l then I want to run RNA on the laptop. Is this a conundrum?

[Txt.file]

boinc asks for a wu with less then 800mb (your example). The server checks the waiting wu and sends you the first one it can find with less than 800mb ram and your os etc.

so boinc something like selective wu request

[mxplm]

... but since we cannot forecast the RAM usage reliably, this doesn't really help.

[Michael H.W. Weber]

There is just one small problem: RNA World WUs cannot be determined regarding how much RAM exactly they will require. Hence, we assign a somewhat larger RAM requirement to each WU to prevent it from failing. These assigned values are based on experimental observation of what we see on our machines and what users report to us using our forums. So, there is confidence that RNA World WUs will not halt your machine but there is no absolute certainty. If you are scared about your machine crashing, you might want to run a different project on that laptop, although I think it should be running fine in most cases.

Michael.

[ftpd]

12-9-2010 21:36:21 | RNA World | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.

12-9-2010 21:36:21 | RNA World | Reporting 2 completed tasks, requesting new tasks for CPU and NVIDIA GPU

12-9-2010 21:36:30 | RNA World | Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks

12-9-2010 21:36:30 | RNA World | Bericht van project server: No work sent

12-9-2010 21:36:30 | RNA World | Bericht van project server: cmsearch needs 3814.70 MB RAM but only 3311.25 MB is available for use.

12-9-2010 21:36:30 | RNA World | Bericht van project server: cmcalibrate is not available for your type of computer.

12-9-2010 21:36:30 | RNA World | Bericht van project server: (there was work but it was committed to other platforms)

12-9-2010 21:36:31 | RNA World | work fetch suspended by user

How much do not we need??????

Ton (ftpd)

[sorceress]

There is just one small problem: RNA World WUs cannot be determined regarding how much RAM exactly they will require. Hence, we assign a somewhat larger RAM requirement to each WU to prevent it from failing. These assigned values are based on experimental observation of what we see on our machines and what users report to us using our forums. So, there is confidence that RNA World WUs will not halt your machine but there is no absolute certainty. If you are scared about your machine crashing, you might want to run a different project on that laptop, although I think it should be running fine in most cases.

Michael.

Ok. I see the picture I think. No. I'm not scared of my 'puter crashing. Just putting my other WUs on hold while RNA does it's thing. I had a bad experience with a NFS WU that caused computation errors in many of my other projects WUs, causing them to fail. It was caused by an excessive memory demand. I didnt know what was happening until I started seeing all my workunits with the 'waiting for memory' message popping up. When I saw the same thing happening with RNA, I paniced and aborted the WU. But RNA didnt cause my other WU to fail like NSF did when they went into "WFM". They completed and validated as they should. I still dont know why the NSF WU did that.

Anyway, I will set my memory usage on the laptop for 80% and see what happens. Thanks all for the help. I'm not that computer 'savy' when it comes to BOINC. But I am learning! LOL

[Michael H.W. Weber]

The issue they most likely had, was a memory leak which we do not observe in RNA World. The worst thing that can happen with RNA World is that a RAM demanding WU is sitting there "waiting for memory".

Michael.

[sorceress]

The issue they most likely had, was a memory leak which we do not observe in RNA World. The worst thing that can happen with RNA World is that a RAM demanding WU is sitting there "waiting for memory".

Michael.

Thanks Michael . I can live with that, but not having them corrupted as NFS did.