BT 0.78

[stoney]

Could it be that the custom time format broke the "remaining time" column in projects-view?

[Pepo]

Out of pure curiosity, I've installed the BT 0.76 on my old AMD dinosaur (WinXP 32b, fresh BOINC 6.11.9 (installed 1/2 hour ago) running as a service).

Weird result: I can see the machine in Computers, its projects in Projects, all messages in Messages, all (as many as 4: 1+1 CPU + 2 nCPUi ) tasks in Gadget, but the Tasks tab window is literally empty. Just in the status bar, either the "Switched, busy..." or "Update in 5 seconds" text stays displayed and does not change

Few minutes later: I've got the tasks somehow displayed (with correct highlighting), but the displayed data does not change at all, in a couple of minutes it is sadly outdated. Interestingly the progress% does continually change in the Gadget.
The same "Switched, busy..." is true for Transfers tab.

Note2: even two restarts did nothing with it.

The app was restarted last time just few minutes after posting the previous message. But the whole Sunday it behaved as weird as described.

Now it suddenly displays both Tasks and Transfers tabs correctly. The system was just a couple of times hibernated and resumed since my post.

Now on 0.78. The Tasks and Transfers tabs still behave ... sometimes correctly, but sometimes no update in a couple of minutes. Currently monitoring local 6.11.9 and remote 6.11.9 with TTh. Regardless of the combination of displayed machines. Other tabs have no (0) problems.

[fred]

Could it be that the custom time format broke the "remaining time" column in projects-view?

No, I don't think so. Did you switch on the history, otherwise this column is empty.

[Pepo]

Now on 0.78. The Tasks and Transfers tabs still behave ... sometimes correctly, but sometimes no update in a couple of minutes. Currently monitoring local 6.11.9 and remote 6.11.9 with TTh. Regardless of the combination of displayed machines. Other tabs have no (0) problems.

Heh. Not one. Both machines' BTs are now in such weird state. (Waiting or Updating... or Switched, busy...)
It seems that the BTs are puzzled with the older (Win XP SP3 x32) machine. When I limit both BTs to display just the newer (Win7 x64) machine's client, they behave correctly.

One subtle difference in displayed data: on the x64 machine, there is one CPDN task with unfinished download. the same machine's BT is displaying the task's state as "Downloading", but the remote x32 machine's BT calls it "Suspended". In the task's Properties window, both BTs say unisono "State            Downloading".

[Beyond]

Now on 0.78. The Tasks and Transfers tabs still behave ... sometimes correctly, but sometimes no update in a couple of minutes. Currently monitoring local 6.11.9 and remote 6.11.9 with TTh. Regardless of the combination of displayed machines. Other tabs have no (0) problems.

Heh. Not one. Both machines' BTs are now in such weird state. (Waiting or Updating... or Switched, busy...)
It seems that the BTs are puzzled with the older (Win XP SP3 x32) machine. When I limit both BTs to display just the newer (Win7 x64) machine's client, they behave correctly.

I have the same thing happening (not BT version specific) except that I'm running 6 Win 7-64 and 3 Win XP-64 machines.  Two are attached by wireless lan and I'm thinking that they may have something to do with the problem.  Sometimes things run well for a while then the updating problems start again.  Often have to close BT and restart it to get the Tasks tab to update.  History updates fine and the other tabs don't seem to be as much of a problem, just Tasks.

[Pepo]

Now on 0.78. The Tasks and Transfers tabs still behave ... sometimes correctly, but sometimes no update in a couple of minutes.

Heh. Not one. Both machines' BTs are now in such weird state. (Waiting or Updating... or Switched, busy...)
It seems that the BTs are puzzled with the older (Win XP SP3 x32) machine. When I limit both BTs to display just the newer (Win7 x64) machine's client, they behave correctly.

I have the same thing happening (not BT version specific) except that I'm running 6 Win 7-64 and 3 Win XP-64 machines. [...] Sometimes things run well for a while then the updating problems start again.  Often have to close BT and restart it to get the Tasks tab to update.

If you will encounter such problem again, could you please uncheck all machines in the Computers tab and then check one after another, which one(s) is(are) the culprit(s)?

[fred]

I have the same thing happening (not BT version specific) except that I'm running 6 Win 7-64 and 3 Win XP-64 machines.  Two are attached by wireless lan and I'm thinking that they may have something to do with the problem.  Sometimes things run well for a while then the updating problems start again.  Often have to close BT and restart it to get the Tasks tab to update.  History updates fine and the other tabs don't seem to be as much of a problem, just Tasks.

Tasks is also the one with most of the data.
1 The wireless lan is on a static IP address?
2 When this happens is the history tab still counting down and updating and counting down again?

[Pepo]

Tasks is also the one with most of the data.
1 The wireless lan is on a static IP address?
2 When this happens is the history tab still counting down and updating and counting down again?

If I could chime in - 1) on my (wired) network, where the situation happens, there are DHCP addresses ranged like [so.me.thing.50-so.me.thing.99] with lease time 1 week, 2) the History tab does count down and refresh correctly (whereas the "damaged" tabs do not change their state text on Status bar at all), 0) Tasks of the "bad" machine contains usually 3-5 lines.

When you speak about network, something springs in my mind - on the offending machine, there are 3 wired network cards, 1-2 are unused, one of them and a third one are bridged (Windows control panel). Might perhaps cause problems to some software, which tries to use physical network adapters? I guess BT just "plain talks" over network...

[stoney]

No, I don't think so. Did you switch on the history, otherwise this column is empty.

*Pat*
Thou shalt not change settings and update at the same time 

[Pepo]

(Waiting or Updating... or Switched, busy...)

I've set the update frequency to Slow, in order to see the numerical countdown. I can often see e.g. "Update in 4 seconds, 3 Tasks" for 20-30-... seconds long. But the count fortunately goes down
(OK, better said, it sometimes goes down.)

One subtle difference in displayed data: on the x64 machine, there is one CPDN task with unfinished download. the same machine's BT is displaying the task's state as "Downloading", but the remote x32 machine's BT calls it "Suspended". In the task's Properties window, both BTs say unisono "State            Downloading".

This difference is still there and I can not get any possible reason for this...

[Beyond]

I have the same thing happening (not BT version specific) except that I'm running 6 Win 7-64 and 3 Win XP-64 machines.  Two are attached by wireless lan and I'm thinking that they may have something to do with the problem.  Sometimes things run well for a while then the updating problems start again.  Often have to close BT and restart it to get the Tasks tab to update.  History updates fine and the other tabs don't seem to be as much of a problem, just Tasks.

Tasks is also the one with most of the data.
1 The wireless lan is on a static IP address?
2 When this happens is the history tab still counting down and updating and counting down again?

1) My lan was using DHCP but the wireless IPs kept jumping around causing problems with BT, so I switched everything over to static IPs.  The BT situation improved but it's still not updating the Tasks tab reliably.

2) The History tab keeps updating.  Many WUs scroll by while the Tasks tab is still trying to update.  (I run MW on 8 GPUs so there's a WU completing on the average of every 25 seconds there alone.)

[fred]

1) My lan was using DHCP but the wireless IPs kept jumping around causing problems with BT, so I switched everything over to static IPs.  The BT situation improved but it's still not updating the Tasks tab reliably.

2) The History tab keeps updating.  Many WUs scroll by while the Tasks tab is still trying to update.  (I run MW on 8 GPUs so there's a WU completing on the average of every 25 seconds there alone.)

1) The next version 0.79, the history is improved a lot. The system overhead will be reduced by a lot, especially on systems with lots of WU's. Set to Experimental smart mode.
2) My setup is quite similar, but I got some further ideas on improving.

[fred]

1) One subtle difference in displayed data: on the x64 machine, there is one CPDN task with unfinished download. the same machine's BT is displaying the task's state as "Downloading", but the remote x32 machine's BT calls it "Suspended". In the task's Properties window, both BTs say unisono "State            Downloading".

This difference is still there and I can not get any possible reason for this...

1) What is the exact text in the status, in English  .

[Pepo]

1) One subtle difference in displayed data: on the x64 machine, there is one CPDN task with unfinished download. the same machine's BT is displaying the task's state as "Downloading", but the remote x32 machine's BT calls it "Suspended". In the task's Properties window, both BTs say unisono "State            Downloading".

1) What is the exact text in the status, in English  .

All previously written was observed while using the English GUI.
If you mean the task's status, then "Downloading" and "Suspended" in the two BTs.
If you mean the BT's status bar, then all possible usual text values you can imagine while in the Tasks tab (and all texts I've posted in previous messages), just that any text will not change in the usual 1 second, but keeps MUCH longer.


Interesting is that this slowed state persists just as long as the BTs are connected to the particular client.

[Pepo]

Interesting is that this slowed state persists just as long as the BTs are connected to the particular client.

Maybe I've got it? I've just seen that the History tab's status bar constantly displays  "Updating..." without the usual 30 second countdown. I've seen something like this in the past when observing a task approaching its finish. A look into the Tasks tab: One FreeHal@home pseudo-nCi task was claiming being progressed to some couple of hundreds or thousands %...
I've aborted the task, updated project - as the task disappeared, BT was suddenly working as usual.. After downloading a new FreeHal@home task and starting it, in a while (around 141.756% seems to be enough) BT was sluggish again
Suspending the task seems to be enough to heal the sluggishness.

So, the idea was that maybe the high progress percentage triggers BT to go into "superfast history fetching" mode for a task approaching its end? The task contains sometimes no ETA, or "Estimated time remaining      -", sometimes just a few seconds...

BTW, what about displaying the weird progress percentage? BOINC Manager displays no (0.000%) Fraction done for the task, the same is true for BT's task properties window. But the Tasks tab often displays a strange value. Is it somehow computed? I suspect that the strange application generates no fraction_done, among other things it also generates no boinc_task_state.xml file in its slot...