I long ago fixed my probelms.
I was just pissed that the interface setting are no intuitive for cpdn adn I had to come here to the forum to het the answers as it is not in the documentation.
And no one has as yet shown it to be the documentation anywhere: the answers are only to be found here in the forum.
That in itself is laughable and justifies my admittedly ecessive rants.

So there will be plenty more users like me coming here to get the answers as a result and reaidng these postings.

I didnt know that BOINIC runs at lower priority: I had ceased long ago to think of desktop OSes as prioritized as few apps use it.

In any case the BOINIC (projects) still chews up memory (and resources) when paused so I may or may not tolerate this ans tweak my prefs some meore.

I would ask that what people have wriiten here go into the FAQ/Wiki and the advisory of the non-functionality fo the default preferences goes into it.

Regards.

If I understand it properly, he was overriding the general preferences via the simple view\'s preference override screen.

Perhaps, but the preferences in Simple View make a global_preferences_override.xml file with just the options that you can set through the preferences. For all other preferences, BOINC will fall back to the global_prefs.xml file.

But even setting your idle time through simple view preferences shows this in messages:

22/03/2007 15:09:25||Suspending computation - user is active
22/03/2007 15:09:25|ABC@home|[cpu_sched] Preempting abc_wu_88343585000_225000_0 (left in memory)
22/03/2007 15:09:25|ABC@home|[task_debug] task_state=SUSPENDED for abc_wu_88343585000_225000_0 from suspend
22/03/2007 15:16:13||General prefs: from climateprediction.net (last modified 2007-03-22 13:20:19)
22/03/2007 15:16:13||Host location: home
22/03/2007 15:16:13||General prefs: no separate prefs for home; using your defaults
22/03/2007 15:16:13||Reading preferences override file

See that User is active? So my BOINC is not crunching CPDN at this moment.
That\'s using BOINC 5.8.16, though.

Matthew is using 5.8.11 which may well have a problem with the simple GUI. Try using BOINC 5.8.15 (install directly on top of the old one).

Edit: Saying that.. it would appear the simple view preferences are broken in 5.8.16 ... I can\'t get them to work anymore. ;)

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Jord.

Matthew, you may find the new boinc FAQs useful

http://boincfaq.mundayweb.com/index.php

plus the 4 project READMEs linked to in my signature.

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Cpdn news

I have had another problem with my climate project(s) (x 2 for two virtual or hyper threaded CPUs).

After seeing the \"Elapsed Time\" go up to 8 hours or so for one and 10 hours for the other to my chagrin these tmes have now gone back down to under an hour.

The only contraint I have placed is a limit of 2GB of disk space.

There is an option associated with allowing a paused project to i think take up RAM or Swap space - this is turned on.

I am running Vista but am having no other file system or corruption issues on my system.

I think I have reached the point where I am going to get rid of BOINIC and the climate simulator.

My logic is in addition to the above:

* It adds to my CPU power consumption and power bills and therefore contributes to greenhouse gases and global warming.

* The short of it is that we now know enough to know that the proverbial shit is going to hit the fan by mid century when climate change will begin to reach the point (assuming little is done of course) where crop failures, famines etc will begin to take place and sink home in the collectively slow mind of the excessive masses humanity (5 out 6 billion too many for the planet carry capacity at a resonable western standard or living)... I could go on but there is no need to as it is clear enough that we need to ween ourselves entirely off of the carbon economy in very short shrift - whether the models predict another 1 degrees, 3 degrees, 5 degrees, or whatever, by then is of little consequence to me or anyone else I believe... there are so many unknown hidden variables not yet in the models: carbon and methane in permafrost, the exact temperatures at which carbon frozen in various types of forests (equatorial, temperate, alpine etc etc) this can be dependent upon whethere and what types of parisites, borers etc infest the temperature stressed trees etc etc (a recent study shows that the Amazon is actually consuming carbon rather then being carbon neutral (averaged over a year)), the geophysics associated with the undermining of contenantal ice sheets etc. Predicting the species, there requirements, and their impacts upon temperature stressed forests etc is a near imposibility in any model. Complex systems - ecological or otherwise - are just not that easily modelled.

SORRY GUYS but my conclusion is that I will contribute more by not contributing to the climate prediction project anymore. That energy sould be better spent educating the public and importantly our ostrich politicians.

But all the best with it anyway guys and keep up the good work (let me know when you can accurately model even the smallest ecosystem and not just geophysics with plug values for ecophyics...)

Regards,
Matthew.

Of the three crashes on your machine, two were -107... errors, most likely a hardware/driver issue.
The third was aborted by you.

Elapsed time always resets to zero when Runs crash and new Models start. You had two crashes yesterday, ergo...

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

Ok, I had the same problem as Hem etc, and to be honest I really do think it is a VERY serious issue, it practically makes BOINC malware, and as such it should be absolute top priority for whoever is in charge to fix ASAP.

Anyway, I found out the problem. The BOINC client reads from a prefs overrides file when exiting the prefs screen (I don\'t know if this is a fail safe or its normal behavior, but it does it every time for me, which I discovered after I checked the message log).
However, this prefs overrides file does NOT update the \'run while user is active\' option when saving your prefs on either the web site or in the client itself, as a result the option can never be turned off... unless you directly edit the file itself.

Thus, if you wish to turn off \'runs while user is active\' you must first make sure BOINC isn\'t running (exit the program), then go to the install directory (C:\\Program Files\\BOINC) and open the file \'global_prefs_override.xml\' in notepad.
Find the line \'<run_if_user_active>1</run_if_user_active>\' and change the 1 to a 0.
Save the file and then open up BOINC, it should now work properly :)

If you have an issue with boinc, this is the wrong place. This is a CPDN site, U. of Oxford. UC Berkeley maintains boinc.

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

Anyway, I found out the problem. The BOINC client reads from a prefs overrides file when exiting the prefs screen (I don\'t know if this is a fail safe or its normal behavior, but it does it every time for me, which I discovered after I checked the message log).

global_prefs_override.xml only exists if you have manually created it. It is not there in a standard installation.

Thus, if you wish to turn off \'runs while user is active\' you must first make sure BOINC isn\'t running (exit the program), then go to the install directory (C:\\Program Files\\BOINC) and open the file \'global_prefs_override.xml\' in notepad.
Find the line \'<run_if_user_active>1</run_if_user_active>\' and change the 1 to a 0.
Save the file and then open up BOINC, it should now work properly :)

You don\'t need to stop BOINC if you want to change global_prefs_override.xml:

• You can switch to the BOINC simple view, click on the \'Preferences\' link and change your local override settings in the dialog box that opens up.
  
  
• You can edit the file manually, switch to the BOINC advanced view and use the \'Advanced - Read local prefs file\' menu item to load the new settings.
  

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"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Hi, I am having trouble with getting Boinc to only run while my computer is idle. According to my prefences that I go to by following the BOINC CPDN link to the left and then going to my account, my computer is set to only turn on BOINC while idle after three minutes. That\'s not what it\'s doing. It\'s running BOINC all the time (this wasn\'t a problem a few weeks ago. This is something that has started only since I\'ve been running CPDN. (I was running SETI till their server crashed, and I switched to BOINC then; I did not have this problem with SETI).

When I go to the simple view of BOINC and select preferences and then try to change the option on when to run BOINC and save my preferences, everything appears to go O.K., but the preferences appear not to work and, when I go back to the preferences, it still says that BOINC will run all the time.

This really makes using CPDN unpleasant. My computer is so slow when it\'s running.

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But your models are racing!

After you\'d changed your preferences, did you remember to click Update in boinc manager to tell the server? I don\'t suppose this takes effect until network activity is enabled.

If you haven\'t already disabled the screensaver, I\'d advise doing so. It slows the model processing and can disrupt normal use on some computers. If you\'ve been running the screensaver, try stopping it before attempting to change your preferences again. You can always view your globe through the button in boinc manager. On my old computer, stopping the screensaver was sufficient to make the computer behave normally again.

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Cpdn news

In the Boinc manager\'s main menu, Activity, is \'run always\' ticked, or is \'run according to preferences\'? If it\'s Run Always, then set it to \'according to preferences\' instead.

Normally having Boinc running shouldn\'t make your PC slow down, unless memory is short.

I\'m not too familiar with the memory requirements of Darwin, but for Windows XP 512MB is a little tight for two models (entirely possible, but only if there\'s not too much other stuff running). Each model takes 100MB, which leaves 300MB for the rest of your system.

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I'm a volunteer and my views are my own.
News and Announcements and FAQ

B
If you haven\'t already disabled the screensaver, I\'d advise doing so.

Well, I\'ve turned that off. We\'ll see what happens.

By the way, I\'m on a Mac.

In the Boinc manager\'s main menu, Activity, is \'run always\' ticked, or is \'run according to preferences\'? If it\'s Run Always, then set it to \'according to preferences\' instead.

My \"run according to preferences\" is ticked. (By the way, I\'m on Mac of pretty recent vintage).

All seems in order--but I never really seem to be able to save the preference for starting up after inactivity. I go to the dialogue box. My preference is set to run CPDN after 0 minutes of inactivity. I select in the menu three minutes instead. I hit the save button. The window closes. When I open it again, it says that I\'m still set at 0 minutes, and nothing has changed. Hmmm.

Thanks for your help.

I may just have to manually close out of boinc when I\'m working. That\'s not a huge burden.

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There was a problem months ago when cpdn\'s preferences couldn\'t be changed until Oxford upgraded the boinc software. Yours is I think the only recent complaint so I assume the preferences changes are working, at least for nearly everyone.

When cpdn preferences changes were out of action, we suggested the following. Change them through another project, whereupon the change would propagate to cpdn. You could attach to another project (you wouldn\'t need to actually run any WUs from it) and try this workaround. If this worked, you could either detach from the other project, or set it to No new work.

Another suggestion. When you\'re using the computer, suspend one model (you\'d first need to set cpdn to No new work in the Projects tab). When you\'re not using the computer, let both models run.

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Cpdn news

Thanks so much for your help. I\'ll try going to another project and changing preferences there.

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Thanks again for you kind help.

Well, well, well. I\'ve completely read this thread now, and it appears that people who know a lot about BOINC and CPDN are saying that it is unlikely that running CPDN while I\'m working on my computer, in my case a MAC Pentium running an up-to-date system, should affect my computer\'s performance noticeably.

Am I correct in that conclusion? Would anyone care to qualify that statement?

Oh, and just too let you know where I\'m coming from, I\'m pretty bright, but my field is way outside the area of computers--and the knowledge I have of them is guided by a strict need-to-know standard.

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I\'ve never used a Mac, only Windows. In Windows you should see normal computer performance if you have the recommended 512Mb RAM per model. But it may be necessary to disable the screensaver to achieve this.

I can get normal performance with the model running in the background on a computer whose CPU is only 1.33GHz ie below the minimum project specs in this regard. But it has 512Mb RAM for just the one model. The amount of memory seems more significant for good overall performance than the CPU speed.

By the way, running 2 models in tandem with less than the recommended memory could sooner or later cause a model crash. If I were you, I\'d regularly back up the contents of the boinc folder just in case. Instructions thro the link in my sig.

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Cpdn news

Thanks again...

I\'m coming to the conclusion that my supposed performance problems are illusory.

My computer has always slowed down periodically if I\'ve had too many complex applications working at once--which happens frequently in my life. The only difference now is that I know I cannot tell CPDN to work only when my machine is idle. So, now, when things slow down, I have been blaming it on CPDN, when, in fact, CPDN has nothing to do with it. My computer is just doing what it\'s always done, I\'m just blaming it on CPDN.

Thanks for helping me through this process of self-discovery. I feel like a fool.

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Can you add more memory to this computer? Not terribly expensive and it can be a do-it-yourself job for you or a friend. Extra RAM improves a computer all-round if there wasn\'t really enough for everything.

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Cpdn news

Can you add more memory to this computer? Not terribly expensive and it can be a do-it-yourself job for you or a friend.

You know, that\'s just what I was thinking to do after reading the posts here. As it is, I have only 512M. I\'ll mull this over and probably take action in a few days (I\'m such a computer wimp that I hate opening the darn machine to put in new memory, so it\'ll take me a few days to work up my resolve).

Thanks!

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