Optimal Preferences Parameters ?

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Grutte Pier [Wa Oars]~MAB The Frisian
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Message 5592 - Posted: 8 Dec 2005, 16:17:37 UTC
Last modified: 8 Dec 2005, 16:47:45 UTC

Would like to know if there are optimal preferences parameters?
The ones shown below are the ones I have and I'm interested in but are they the best to crunch with ?
I'm running only R@H and on different systems.

Leave applications in memory while preempted?
(suspended applications will consume swap space if 'yes') no
Switch between applications every
(recommended: 60 minutes) 1 minutes
On multiprocessors, use at most 2 processors
Disk and memory usage
Use no more than 1 GB disk space
Leave at least 0.2 GB disk space free
Use no more than 50% of total disk space
Write to disk at most every 60 seconds
Use no more than 75% of total virtual memory
Network usage
Enforced by versions 4.46 and greater (no restriction)
Skip image file verification?
Check this ONLY if your Internet provider modifies image files (UMTS does this, for example).
Skipping verification reduces the security of BOINC. no
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Profile KSMarksPsych
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Message 5631 - Posted: 8 Dec 2005, 20:23:17 UTC - in response to Message 5592.  

Would like to know if there are optimal preferences parameters?
The ones shown below are the ones I have and I'm interested in but are they the best to crunch with ?
I'm running only R@H and on different systems.

Leave applications in memory while preempted?
(suspended applications will consume swap space if 'yes') no
Switch between applications every
(recommended: 60 minutes) 1 minutes
On multiprocessors, use at most 2 processors
Disk and memory usage
Use no more than 1 GB disk space
Leave at least 0.2 GB disk space free
Use no more than 50% of total disk space
Write to disk at most every 60 seconds
Use no more than 75% of total virtual memory
Network usage
Enforced by versions 4.46 and greater (no restriction)
Skip image file verification?
Check this ONLY if your Internet provider modifies image files (UMTS does this, for example).
Skipping verification reduces the security of BOINC. no



I run with the standard settings and have almost 0 problems. The only change I made was leaving app in memory to yes. It seems like here at Rosetta that will keep wu's from erroring out. If you let us know about your system, we'll be able to help you better.

Kathryn
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Grutte Pier [Wa Oars]~MAB The Frisian
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Message 5633 - Posted: 8 Dec 2005, 20:29:44 UTC - in response to Message 5631.  
Last modified: 8 Dec 2005, 20:30:30 UTC

Would like to know if there are optimal preferences parameters?
The ones shown below are the ones I have and I'm interested in but are they the best to crunch with ?
I'm running only R@H and on different systems.

Leave applications in memory while preempted?
(suspended applications will consume swap space if 'yes') no
Switch between applications every
(recommended: 60 minutes) 1 minutes
On multiprocessors, use at most 2 processors
Disk and memory usage
Use no more than 1 GB disk space
Leave at least 0.2 GB disk space free
Use no more than 50% of total disk space
Write to disk at most every 60 seconds
Use no more than 75% of total virtual memory
Network usage
Enforced by versions 4.46 and greater (no restriction)
Skip image file verification?
Check this ONLY if your Internet provider modifies image files (UMTS does this, for example).
Skipping verification reduces the security of BOINC. no



I run with the standard settings and have almost 0 problems. The only change I made was leaving app in memory to yes. It seems like here at Rosetta that will keep wu's from erroring out. If you let us know about your system, we'll be able to help you better.

Kathryn


At the moment I have several different systems.
XP2800+@2360MHz/1GBmem/80GBhd/FX5950U
Sempron2800+@2160MHz/512MBmem/10GBhd/FX5500
Cellie800@992MHz/256MBmen/6GBhd/MatroxG200
These three run on W2K.
And further some other lose systems running on XP, but the Cellie is the slowest one.

The preferences must run on all systems.
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Message 5637 - Posted: 8 Dec 2005, 21:41:19 UTC - in response to Message 5633.  

Would like to know if there are optimal preferences parameters?
The ones shown below are the ones I have and I'm interested in but are they the best to crunch with ?
I'm running only R@H and on different systems.

Leave applications in memory while preempted?
(suspended applications will consume swap space if 'yes') no
Switch between applications every
(recommended: 60 minutes) 1 minutes
On multiprocessors, use at most 2 processors
Disk and memory usage
Use no more than 1 GB disk space
Leave at least 0.2 GB disk space free
Use no more than 50% of total disk space
Write to disk at most every 60 seconds
Use no more than 75% of total virtual memory
Network usage
Enforced by versions 4.46 and greater (no restriction)
Skip image file verification?
Check this ONLY if your Internet provider modifies image files (UMTS does this, for example).
Skipping verification reduces the security of BOINC. no



I run with the standard settings and have almost 0 problems. The only change I made was leaving app in memory to yes. It seems like here at Rosetta that will keep wu's from erroring out. If you let us know about your system, we'll be able to help you better.

Kathryn


At the moment I have several different systems.
XP2800+@2360MHz/1GBmem/80GBhd/FX5950U
Sempron2800+@2160MHz/512MBmem/10GBhd/FX5500
Cellie800@992MHz/256MBmen/6GBhd/MatroxG200
These three run on W2K.
And further some other lose systems running on XP, but the Cellie is the slowest one.

The preferences must run on all systems.

I've never ever had a problem with not leaving the application in memory. It shouldn't matter as in either case it goes to the hard drive (swap space) but it seems in rare cases it's solved a problem. If you start getting errors, might switch to leave it in memory and just make sure all your machines have enough swap space.

I WOULD advise that you slightly increase the max HD space allowed. There are cases where the BOINC directory gets filled up with junk (especially if you run the HUGE CPDN WUs) and your machine stops getting new work. 2-3 GB should be fine. And I also increase the max percentage of HD used -- probably to 75%. That'll put your little box high enough so it won't be a problem. If (and it's certainly never happened to me in a couple years of crunching) you run out of HD space, just set the value for min HD space free a bit higher.

The defaults really do run quite optimally though. If you're always connected to the internet, you can easily leave the connection time to .1 days (I do). .5 days would give you a bit of leeway for outages, but if you're connected to more than one project, you'll be covered anyway. I like to return WUs instead of hoarding, though if you're on dialup, 1-2 days is fine.

Finally, you shouldn't HAVE to have the same settings for each machine. You get three different settings -- work, home and school (IIRC, maybe just two?). You can set the different machines to different locations and they'll run with different preferences. I do run them all the same though as I don't have any reason to do otherwise.
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Message 5649 - Posted: 9 Dec 2005, 0:31:13 UTC - in response to Message 5592.  

Leave applications in memory while preempted?
(suspended applications will consume swap space if 'yes') no


Definitely should be "Yes".

Switch between applications every
(recommended: 60 minutes) 1 minutes


Combined with "no" for leave in memory, I am surprised you are able to successfully complete any results... this setting should DEFINITELY never be this low. Most people seem happiest at the 60 minute default; I can see dropping it to 30 for some; many prefer to raise it to 120 or 180. I would never go below 30.

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Grutte Pier [Wa Oars]~MAB The Frisian
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Message 5665 - Posted: 9 Dec 2005, 5:37:29 UTC - in response to Message 5649.  
Last modified: 9 Dec 2005, 5:39:13 UTC

Switch between applications every
(recommended: 60 minutes) 1 minutes


Combined with "no" for leave in memory, I am surprised you are able to successfully complete any results... this setting should DEFINITELY never be this low. Most people seem happiest at the 60 minute default; I can see dropping it to 30 for some; many prefer to raise it to 120 or 180. I would never go below 30.

I'm only running R@H, so what difference would it make ?
I could also change it to 24400.
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Message 5666 - Posted: 9 Dec 2005, 5:39:32 UTC - in response to Message 5665.  

I'm only running R@H, so what difference would it make ?


<slaps head!> None. Nevermind.

(But if you add another project, you'll want to change that...)

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Grutte Pier [Wa Oars]~MAB The Frisian
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Message 5667 - Posted: 9 Dec 2005, 5:42:44 UTC - in response to Message 5666.  
Last modified: 9 Dec 2005, 5:44:15 UTC

I'm only running R@H, so what difference would it make ?


<slaps head!> None. Nevermind.

(But if you add another project, you'll want to change that...)

No problem, I understand, but are you sure about : Leave applications in memory while preempted? yes.
Even on the ones with 256MB mem ?

What if a system restarts itself without stopping normal ?


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Message 5670 - Posted: 9 Dec 2005, 6:04:33 UTC - in response to Message 5667.  

No problem, I understand, but are you sure about : Leave applications in memory while preempted? yes.
Even on the ones with 256MB mem ?

What if a system restarts itself without stopping normal ?


That one will make little difference, if any, when running _only_ Rosetta. It is of major importance to leave Rosetta in memory when switching to another project. It will be removed from memory when BOINC quits, so there is always the possibility of an error there. If there is a crash, it would have been in memory anyway at the time. As long as the Rosetta application is "running", even if it is getting no CPU time because of some other activity, it will stay in RAM or VM.

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Message 5675 - Posted: 9 Dec 2005, 6:37:53 UTC - in response to Message 5666.  
Last modified: 9 Dec 2005, 6:38:13 UTC

I'm only running R@H, so what difference would it make ?


<slaps head!> None. Nevermind.

(But if you add another project, you'll want to change that...)


Also, setting "leave in memory" to yes may help to avoid problems when the current WU is suspended to do benchmarks. As far as I can tell, they are done about every 5 days, so that might help a bit.

But for the most part it won't make that much difference.

As a side thought to this, have we considered asking the Boinc people to change that setting to something along the lines of "Only switch projects and run bench marks at the end of a WU." This would not work for those running CPDN, of course, but for everything else it ought to work.
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Message boards : Number crunching : Optimal Preferences Parameters ?



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