Topics

I have 8 machines attached to Boinctasks.  Itself, 6 other Windows 10 PCs, and an Android 7 phone.  One of the PCs is old and tired and often crashes or doesn't respond.  Why does this lock up Boinctasks?  The whole screen goes blank, the menus are inoperative, and task manager reports it's using an entire CPU core.  What on earth is it doing?  Surely if there's no response from one machine, just display the others?

The status column correctly shows running, ready to report, etc.  But I have a task that says "waiting to run" when in Boinc manager it actually says "Postponed: VM Hypervisor failed to enter an online state" - this is a common error in Kryptos@home when Virtualbox gets stuck.  I need to know when that happens, as although it says "postponed" it never continues it and I have to abort that task or it will never do it and never get more work from the project.

I couldn't find a better place to suggest this, but if anybody wants to try, I think it would be possible to use Tthrottle to control your room temperature, and run Boinc to heat your home.  I'm not going to do it myself because I want Boinc to run as much as possible, but for those trying to save money by doing two things at once:

Find a sensor on your computer(s) (say a motherboard sensor well away from the CPU/GPU, could be called ambient, use HWinfo as an external option so you can choose which sensor), physically locate it and make sure it's got a good draught of air from the room (add a fan blowing onto it if necessary).  Set Tthrottle to the temperature you want the room to be.  As the room cools below this temperature, Boinc will run more and more.  When the room is warm enough, it stops Boinc altogether.

If I look in the history tab, I see many tasks as "Reported: OK" in the status column, but the odd one says "Reported: OK+".  What does the + signify?

I know this may be an odd thing to ask for, and maybe I'm the only one that wants it, but if you could add a tickbox to allow adding a column to show the project's weight, so I can sort by it, I'd be extremely happy :-)  I'm attached to 13 projects, some a lot higher weight than others, so it would be nice to see the important ones at the top of the list.

Forgive me, I don't understand Android version numbers, there seem to be two numbers, a friendly version and a kernel version?
Also my older phone (phone 2 below), can't make up its mind what version it is.

Phone 1 (works perfectly):
Not rooted
Android 7.0
Kernel 3.18.35
(those numbers are shown in both system and CPU-Z and in agreement)

Phone 2 (the weird one):
Rooted (Kingoroot)
Sold as, and reported in system as, Android 6.0 (although CPU-Z claimed 4.5 before I rooted it, after rooting CPU-Z refuses to start)
Kernel 3.4.67

Phone 1 runs Boinc for Boinctasks perfectly.
Phone 2 just says "App not installed" when I try to install the APK.  It gives no reasoning.

Until I joined Primegrid, sorting in Boinctasks by the Application column worked ok.  But when I joined Primegrid, it didn't seem to put the applications together.  I noticed it seems to be sorting only by the first handful of characters, so in World Community Grid, "7.18 Smash Childhood Cancer" comes before "7.27 Africa Rainfall Project", but in Primegrid, several applications starting with "9.00" are all lumped together.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1rmm59qszzardup/Sorting.jpg?dl=0

I have Boinctasks successfully transmitting to the cloud, but the computer column doesn't show up.  That would be useful as I have 6 machines.

Boinc Manager can shutdown the remote client it's connected to.  It would be nice if Boinctasks could also do this, at the moment it will only shut down the local one.

In extra, boinc preference, processor, "on multiprocessor systems, use at most", the number of CPUs would be easier than the percentage.  I have two machines with 24 cores each.  Converting to a percentage is a nuisance and requires me to get my calculator out!

Be aware that if this has to be converted to a percentage to give to boinc, then it should increase it slightly.  Eg if I have 3 cores and enter 66.6%, it will use only 1 core.  If I enter 66.7% it will use 2 cores.  Boinc rounds down, not up.

Is the cloud still functional?  I tried to set up an account, but I can only see an option to log in.  It says I don't have an account and please create one, but there is no link to do so!

I have Windows 10 set to display quite a long date format, so Boinctasks is showing "Wed, 20/5/2020 11:15:09 AM" in the deadline column which makes it rather wide.  I tried changing the setting in extra, boinctasks settings, view, but the user defined option doesn't work.  It just shows exactly what I type, eg "d, HH:MM:SS" and doesn't interpret it as a date and time.

This may be a weird and unusual request, but I like to monitor my Boinc machines in two different ways at once:
1) Divided by computer so I can quickly see if one is crashed, offline, stuck tasks etc.
2) Divided by project so I can get a quick overview of how many tasks are running for each project across all computers.

At the moment I'm doing this by having Boinctasks running on two computers, then remote access one of them so they're both displayed on local monitors (all the other machines are in a different room for quietness).

Would it be possible to run two instances of Boinctasks on one machine to save me having to do the remote access stuff?

I often see Boinctasks not refreshing the screen.  Either it does it very several seconds (instead of the 1 I set it to), sometimes every 30 seconds, sometimes never again until restarting it.  The status bar at the bottom says "updating.....73" where 73 is counting the number of seconds since the last update.  It's monitoring itself and 3 other computers on a local network which has no other problems and is fast and not overloaded.  The computer Boinctasks is on is not overloaded.  Any idea why?  Boinctasks does have immense difficulty connecting to new computers or ones I've rebooted, it seems a rather flimsy communication system.

Messages view doesn't show all computers at once, but allows you to select all computers, without telling you it's not doing so.  It just displays the last single computer you selected.

I am unable to set the max memory usage using Boinctasks.  I'm getting projects sending me tasks which overuse the memory on an older machine and wanted to change it.  I had to go into the Boinc Manager to do so.

Mind you, Boinc ignored me anyway!  I set it to 50% memory usage, and Amicable numbers gave me an 8GB task, completely locking up the 8GB machine :-/

Boinc Client correctly reports download speed of files as kBps (kilobytes per second)
But Boinctasks (I have the latest Beta, version 1.80) reports it as kbps (which would be kilobits per second).

I currently run Boinc on 3 desktops, all Windows 10.  One of them has Boinctasks, which I use to control them all and view progress.

I just installed Boinc on an Android phone, can I view it with my Windows 10 machine with Boinctasks along with the 3 desktops?

I often get two groups of the same (queued unstarted) tasks, they don't all group as one.  For example I currently see a group of 81 SETI tasks and a group of 18 SETI tasks.  Both groups are identical when contracted: 0.133C + 1 AMD GPU.  When expanded they both contain different names (blc12_2bit_guppi etc) within the group, so that can't be why they split into 2 groups, I'm not sure what causes it.

I clicked something accidentally within the sidebar for selecting computers, and it disappeared.  It's ticked in the view menu, but it isn't there.  I've tried unticking and reticking it, I've tried closing and reopening BOINCTasks, and I've tried to find a little button on the left edge of the window to pull it back.  But it's gone forever, please help!