On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 04:38:47 GMT, "Eric" <nospam@no.nospam.not> wrote:

Not the outages (they don't bother me), but the BOINC software itself?

BOINC?  They become a total slugfest.  BOINC also, sometimes, locks up
explorer.exe (shell, not browser) causing it to automatically reboot.
Whenever explorer automatically reboots, the network drivers get all fungled
up in memory requiring physical reboots of the PC's..  Very annoying as the
PC's are in a closet, without a monitor/mouse/keyboard.

BOINC slows them down a bit initially, but then gets worse and worse until
eventually there is a lockup (anywhere from right away to within a week).
Without BOINC running, things stay great.  With BOINC running (or, even if
ran just once and then closed out), a lockup is sure to happen.

Grrr. Hate to stop crunching the SETI stuff, but don't have much choice
since it keeps breaking these PC's.  Not about to replace these PC's with
newer ones either since they work beautifully as just dumb file dumpsters -- 
as long as BOINC doesn't run.

Hmmmm.... this sounds familiar. Not on an oldie running an ole OS, but
on my Athlon 2 Ghz with 768 megs running Win2K. OK, that IS old....

The same prob with the explorer. Yes peeps, it's still there.

Now for the other part: this morning I found a message on one of the
other puters:
"giving up on upload of .......: too much elapsed time...." 
Since I've been switching to Boinc it's been not too good.
My machines crunch, and they crunch 24/7. One has been online for 7
years now, although it didn't crunch for Seti all that time.

Boinc has seen problems from day 1. OK, sometimes it ran all OK for a
week, but the number of outages is high. Lately, they tried to flush
the whole system, with us crunching as far as we could. Now, my main
machine is able to get new workunits sparsely. It hasn't uploaded one
single result since the stuff came back online, I'm sitting here with
50 results waiting to upload (thats on the main machine alone).
When I look at the server status, I see the units waiting for
validation rise fast again. What's gonna happen? Are they gonna be
rejected because they are overdue? Or will my Boinc software also
decide to give up on upload? Or, better said: I offered my machines to
Seti, paid for the electricity bills, kept the machines running as
good as they can, spent a lot of time maintaining them and now this
awful software decides: OK pal, thanks for your cpu time but it don't
count?
I'm gonna run another few days keeping a sharp eye onto it. If things
screw up, I'm just leaving ship. Period.

Louis