Messages

I need the dmp files, http://www.7-zip.org/ Is by far the best program to compress them.  Use compression level: Ultra LZMA.
You can use the free dropbox program.
I've never been able to reproduce connection problems unfortunately. If you come up with a way to reproduce them, let me know.

Should be there now.  That's a great archiver, compressed the dmp file to less than 2/3 the size of zip.

With LT history enabled I was getting constant crashes / restarts and had > 6.5 GB of backup history files. Disabling LT history and deleting the LT files made BT 90% more stable than it was but there's still a long way to go in that department.  Don't take me wrong, I love BT but there are some nagging stability problems that make it a challenge for those of us with a lot of WUs passing through.  Not to tell you what to do but maybe put the new features on hold until the issues are worked out.

When I don't get crash reports they never get solved, because I haven't seen any crashes myself for a long time. And I got a lot of WU's on my computers.

Maybe the average of > 5 WUs completing/minute is causing me to have more crashes, but shouldn't BT be able to handle that?  The fact is if I try to use long term history BT starts to crash once the file sizes start to build.  By crash reports, do you mean dmp files?  Is there a way to make them smaller?  I only have 1 from today since LT history is disabled.  Before that they were filling my HD.

Also I've been testing closing BOINC clients on the remote machines and restarting them.  BT v1.27 shows the client as reconnected but usually does not show the clients tasks until BT is exited and restarted.  Then everything is shown correctly again.

1.27 did NOT delete the backup files and they grew until there were massive problems..  There seems to be a problem with the new history setup, a problem that's existed  in every version after the 1.21 build.

But it does, see C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\eFMer\BoincTasks\log\BoincTasks Startup.log
It can take a while to complete, so you have to let BT run for a while.

It does not delete the backup for 14 days, it's a backup after all.

How long does it take, maybe BT isn't running long enough without restarting to get the job done?  Why 14 days?  With LT history enabled I was getting constant crashes / restarts and had > 6.5 GB of backup history files. Disabling LT history and deleting the LT files made BT 90% more stable than it was but there's still a long way to go in that department.  Don't take me wrong, I love BT but there are some nagging stability problems that make it a challenge for those of us with a lot of WUs passing through.  Not to tell you what to do but maybe put the new features on hold until the issues are worked out.

BT is back to its looping and making the client disappear.

A client that disappears is always a client problem.
And locking a file is not something BT does.

I have 2 scenarios when clients show as unconnected: the first is when a machine becomes slow due to a heavy load or an app that hogs the processor.  The second is when machines are connected via wireless connections that don't have the best signal strength.  The big problem is the way BT handles these situations: it often crashes (sometimes a hard crash, sometimes a restart).  This has IMO always been the #1 BT problem, it was getting better up to v1.21 and has been worse again since v1.21.

Edit:  A third scenario I've been seeing in v1.27:  if a BOINC client is stopped and restarted for any reason sometimes its jobs will not reappear.  Looking at the left pane it appears to be connected but there are no tasks in the task list.  Left it in this condition for up to 30 minutes and still no tasks.  Double-clicking on the computer will not cause the tasks to reappear, only exiting and restarting BT brings them back.  Have not seen this happen in v1.21.

Turns out that what has grown to a 3 minute start time for BT is related to history logging.  Had to manually delete the 6.5GB of long term history files as well as disabling long term history.  Now BT starts in 2-3 seconds.  I was also getting frequent BT crashes.  Now they've stopped too.

BTW, TT 5.45 has stopped the -35.7479329427759359867939745749497539927 temps here so far 

1.27 should delete files in the background, so any start up delay should be gone.
TT had a small typo, but it effected only some computers.

1.27 did NOT delete the backup files and they grew until there were massive problems..  There seems to be a problem with the new history setup, a problem that's existed  in every version after the 1.21 build. 

The TT typo affected all most if not all of my computers but so far it seems to be fixed in 5.45.

If you haven't tried this yet, I'd suggest:

Disable long term history and then delete all the long term history files from your history and history/backup folders.  Restart BT.

Turns out that what has grown to a 3 minute start time for BT is related to history logging.  Had to manually delete the 6.5GB of long term history files as well as disabling long term history.  Now BT starts in 2-3 seconds.  I was also getting frequent BT crashes.  Now they've stopped too.

BTW, TT 5.45 has stopped the -35.7479329427759359867939745749497539927 temps here so far 

Sorry Anthony, was just trying to offer a helpful alternative.  Think I forgot something once too, but can't remember what it was at the moment 

[lot of videodriver crashes and WU-errors on GF8600GT]

You would also get rid of your Collatz problems:  "I run mini-collatz on my GF8600GT in a dual GPU setup and I get a lot of computation errors."

I don't have a lot of computation erorrs. Where did I say that? You can check it here.

Here's your thread on Collatz:

lot of videodriver crashes and WU-errors on GF8600GT

http://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/forum_thread.php?id=796

Your first post on the subject:

"Hi, I run mini-collatz on my GF8600GT in a dual GPU setup and I get a lot of computation errors. I got those even without my GTX-550OC added to the system. I can't even suspend a collatz task as it will result in a displaydriver crash and a computation error. I also use my GF8600GT as my main display output to my TV. Display on the GTX550OC is totally disabled as I want that card fully dedicated for crunching other non collatz tasks as collatz is the only project that seems to run on my GF8600GT 256MB card. I use the latest nvidia driver 280.26."

How soon we forget...   

The 8600GT still can crunch a mini-collatz in ~2hours. All my Collatz credits from last month are from that card.

Just to give you a reference, even the HD4770 will do a full size Collatz WU in ~1 hour, so is about 16x faster than the 8600.  You should be able to get one for under $50 used.  The HD5770 will do about 43 minutes/large WU for a 23x improvement..  You would also get rid of your Collatz problems:  "I run mini-collatz on my GF8600GT in a dual GPU setup and I get a lot of computation errors."

I run Collatz in a second directory on my second video card. V1.09 has no problems with it and v1.16 had no problems with it either. I'm using port 9999 to connect to my second BOINC client. If I use both videocards (GTX-550 & GF8600GT) in 1 BOINC all project that can use the GTX-550 will try to use the 8600GT too resulting in errors. So I start normail BOINC with a cc_config.xml file with the setting <use_all_gpus>0</use_all_gpus> and in my second BOINC directory with <use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus> and <ignore_cuda_dev>0</ignore_cuda_dev>. Only Collatz seems to run on my 8600GT and I dont want the card to go to waste. My GTX-550 runs all other GPU projects I run, SETI, GPUGrid, Einstein and MilkyWay.

Maybe a bit off topic but possibly a better way.  The 8600 is power hungry and slow.  Sell or give it away and get an ATI/AMD card to replace it.  Even the 1st 40nm card, the HD4770 will FAR outproduce it in Collatz and uses much less energy.  You should be able to get one on the cheap used.  Then you can set Collatz to use ATI/AMD only and the rest of the projects to use NVidia.  Voila, no more problems of this kind with BT.  I'm running 4 machines with mixed ATI / NVidia cards and it's my configuration of choice.  You may want to check to make sure that your MB supports mixed cards.  Pretty much anything with the 790FX, 890FX and 990FX chipsets will do this.  Not sure which intel based chipsets work but checking a few of the hardware forums will get you the anwer (the MB manufacturer support lines generally won't have a clue).

I've meant the BOINC client version.

BOINC 6.12.41. Worked the same with 6.12.34.

for some reason now the localhost TT temp is showing in BT.  In 1.25 the TT temp showed up about 1% of the time if that.

Update:  works for a while at least.  Every once in a while I have to restart TT (5.43) to keep the localhost temps showing in BT 1.27.

See my previous post.  That accounts for 21 seconds but still leaves more than a minute.  Should there be now 6009 files using in excess of 6GB of disk space?

One thing at a time. 
In 1.26 there wasn't any timeout, so it could take a very long time.

Maybe BT is unable to delete the history files, can you check the file properties?
For the 1.27 release I will add a worker thread that deletes all the old history files. The thread will have a very low priority and can the garbage collection on its own.

I have to analize

1.26 didn't start even after an hour...

The folder was marked read only, the files are not.  I removed the read only flag from the folder and BT put it back on when restarted.  How many of those backup files do I need? can I delete some or most of them?

I edited my previous reply and replaced it with the correct log hopefully.

The problem:

11/09/2011, 11:43:57 -- DeleteFiles in folders:D:\Apps\BoincTasks\Data\history\backup\*.*
11/09/2011, 11:44:18 -- Timeout

The history scanning takes a bit long.

See my previous post.  That accounts for 21 seconds but still leaves more than a minute.  Should there be now 6009 files using in excess of 6GB of disk space?