We're #200 @ Rosetta@Home, improving the world!

[Umfriend]

I just hope those user preferences are not saved to the Ramdisk, then you'd lose them every time.

The alternative is to manage preferences though the web via the Rosetta website.

Many thanks for the effort, you're part of a great team!

One thing I'd like to know is how to measure the aggregate read/write I/O (actually hitting a HD) of any single process (not just for BOINC). AFAIK, BOINC has rather little I/O so it should not materially add to the wear of an SSD.

[J1NG]

Had to mess around with quite a bit of stuff. First thing I had to do was alter the initial default settings. I think that's why it tries to grab some 20-30 work units every time it starts back up from a restart or cold boot as that's the default number. Hopefully changing it to the new numbers should prevent it from grabbing more than a days workload.

Storage is now at 4GB, 0.5GB reserve.
Max additional and minimum work buffer is both set at 0.2. This only shoots in a total of 4-6 work units at a time. (0.01 or less basically tells Boinc servers to sod off as far as I can tell
Multi-CPU usage is set to 3 (for testing purposes at the moment)

Will be able to tell if original preferences are reset after the next time I reset the machine. Hopefully it'll stick and then can run it as is without manually aborting some 20 work units.

J1NG

[Umfriend]

What are you current settings for Minimum work buffer and Max additional work buffer? If any, especially the latter, is zero, it may think there is no limit at all (some settings behave such). I would now try 0.01 and 0.01.

[J1NG]

Hmmm... No joy on restarting of machine. Todays download brought in some 25-30 work units again. If I wasn't here all day today, I'd have to abort a whole lot of them again.

Need to look into this again unfortunately.

J1NG

[Umfriend]

I see credits coming in, gr8 J1NG and Box! A Resurected and a Newborn to save our day in just one week!

[J1NG]

Ah, in that case perhaps it is even better to set both at 0.00 or 0.00 and 0.01. Essentially, you do not want any tasks that it can not work on right now.

Cool, that sounds exactly like what I needed, can manage them on the Ramdisk easily then. Didn't want to manually abort them every time I was running them.

Also, if at all possible, you might do two Ramdisks, one for BOINC, say 2GB to 4GB or so and the rest for the other stuff. It could then perhaps save the BOINC-ramdisk on shutdown. Reasoning is, I'm not sure whether the project would suffer from aborts and this way it can always resume work I would think.

Not sure if they said it would cause issues, I assumed it was the same as a passed deadline. But this option is definitely better. Not entirely certain Dataram's Ramdisk allows two instances, but the option you've provided me allows me to control it much more easily, so shouldn't need to get another Ramdisk or another instance running anyway at this point.

I do wonder what kind of system you have where you can spare 32GB as a RamDisk. Why can;t it be used as system ram? If it can, would it not make more sense to use it as system memory and disable a page file? Just wondering.

Heh, it was designed to do a whole bunch of stuff early on. This is the same machine as before (64GB RAM) but lost the HDD when it failed. So it was used to handle: Video editing (Premiere, After Effects), Image manipulation (Photoshop), gaming (and why not? ), secure data handling (when needed), Virtual Machines (when needed, usually in association with secure data handling), Television recording/playback (don't have to worry about any sort of read/write jumping as it's going so fast) and anything else that would kill the SSD unecessarily was put onto the Ramdisk.

I could have left it as 64GB system memory and turned off the pagefile, but other than some of the above reasons, there were unfortunately some snags as a few installations required the damn thing to be present before I could get them installed. So rather than turn it off, just lumped it over to the Ramdisk and basically didn't need to ever remember it ever existed. Much easier than turning it on and off, etc.

J1NG

[Umfriend]

Ah, in that case perhaps it is even better to set both at 0.00 or 0.00 and 0.01. Essentially, you do not want any tasks that it can not work on right now.

Also, if at all possible, you might do two Ramdisks, one for BOINC, say 2GB to 4GB or so and the rest for the other stuff. It could then perhaps save the BOINC-ramdisk on shutdown. Reasoning is, I'm not sure whether the project would suffer from aborts and this way it can always resume work I would think.

I do wonder what kind of system you have where you can spare 32GB as a RamDisk. Why can;t it be used as system ram? If it can, would it not make more sense to use it as system memory and disable a page file? Just wondering.

[J1NG]

Was at 0.00 and 0.25. Currently set to your settings, will see how it goes.

J1NG

[Umfriend]

Try something like this:
Boinc Manager (advanced view) -> Tools -> Computing Preferences -> Network usage -> Set Mimimum work buffer to 0.01 days and Max additional work buffer to 0.1 days or somesuch. What are the values now?

[J1NG]

Using Dataram Ramdisk, paid the license fee for it. Running a 32GB Ramdisk for scratch disk, page file and fast temp file storage. It too has a save on shutdown feature, but 32GB takes a small while to save, so I'd rather just leave it as a blank start up every time it restarts or cold boots.

Currently, it looks like I can manually have Boinc request new work units, but it incredibly decides to download some 30 new work units needing some 200 minutes each to complete. Need to find a way to limit how many it takes each go. Or I suppose I manually abort the excess work units.

*Update* Haven't found a way to manually set the amount of new work units I get yet, but the Abort option seems OK to use. It doesn't look like there's any negatives so far in using it.

J1NG

[Umfriend]

Interesting. With my ASRock boards I got this X-FastRam ramdisk software that neatly saved on shutting down and loaded on boot. I also had another piece of software once, don't remember the name, that was free but limited to 4GB. What SW do you use?

[J1NG]

Currently working on getting Boinc to play nice on a Ramdisk, as there's no longer a HDD for this sytem and I'd rather not have it thrash the remaining SSD's inside it. Once I get it working OK, I'll bring it back online for a more permanent level of work when it's on. Right now, just testing to see how best to make it work on the Ramdisk without losing work when it shuts down.

J1NG

[Umfriend]

Hurray! We have a new member: box!. Welcome to the team, great! Funny that it says you joined since November 21st, 2007! (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/sh...?userid=221948)

Meanwhile, this disaster happened:
Capture.PNG

[Umfriend]

Understandable. High summer I may have to do somethng similar (but I don't think so, the Server is at a good isolated location and it's underclocked and volted as well, we'll see).

Anyway, enjoy the summer!

[ZokesPro]

Had to apply restriction on my server, allowing it it to run nights only. During the cold seasons, no prob, but during the warm season, it gets way too hot in that room.