BOINC program stopping tasks..vista problem?

[imaheadcase]

I been running boinc on windows vista and every so often Tasks just become empty and does not do show any work to do. I HAVE tasks, just it stops doing them until i restart BOINC.

This is very annoying, cause sometimes it will run for a hour and when i get home from work I have to restart it to get it to work, thus missing out on most of the day.


Anyones know what causes this? I just experienced this a few minutes ago for the first time I was at computer, and restarted BOINC with 5 tasks, 2 working and 3 idle, so its not for lack of work units.

 

[amdxborg]

I've had the same problem on a couple of win2000 pcs. Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling boinc?

 

[Silverthorne]

I've had the same problem on some win xp machines.

 

[imaheadcase]

yeah I've reinstalled BOINC quite a bit still does it. I don't really have any idea what the problem could be. I'm guessing its just a BOINC issue, maybe i can submit it as a bug someplace.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

I assume you're using 5.4.11, right? (Maybe also 5.4.9). It's a known problem with the last two official BOINC releases. But there's nothing the devs did yet to adress it. What you see is a communication problem between the BOINC GUI and the BOINC client. This "crash" will only happen when they both try to communicate and the port they're using is already used by some other program at that point. There's virtually no way to avoid it; it's more or less a flaw in the structure of BOINC, to use a port for that communication.

With what project does it happen to you? I only experienced it with Leiden Classical and Rosetta, but not with Einstein, Docking@Home or Spinhenge@Home.

I found a fix for it though. If you cache is big enough, just set "turn off the network activity" in the BOINC manager and the problem shoud be gone. Then, when WUs are ready or you need more work, turn it on, let it download stuff, and turn it off again. So it seems to be relates to network activity in combination with sending/downloading WUs.

That worked really good for me, but might be a problem on fleets like Johan's.

 

[amdxborg]

Hey Chris, nice solution! The weird thing is, I'm having this proplem only on two or three of my pcs at home and not on any of the other pcs at work.. oh well, at least I can keep a better eye on them here!

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Same here Johan, only on my wife's notebook and my AthlonXP 2000+. The others never had it.

 

[imaheadcase]

I only run rosetta on this PC, one of the things that I thought might be a problem is i also run utorrent all the time in background and the upload bandwidth could be saturated to much for boinc to see a connection or something along those lines.

Anyways thanks for solution I'll try it out.

 

[Wiz]

This has been happening on my box at work all weekend, missed two days production x 2 processes. 3.8 ghz machine too, so that hurt.

It's running Rosetta.

I'll try that workaround and see if that helps. Thanks!

 

[Smoke]

I was expecting to see my "hottest" system set some sort of TE RAC record by tomorrow but I had a big drop yesterday. I guess it was due to the same problem you all are talking about but then again, I'm running "Longhorn" and I also noticed my system had shutdown due to a BSD error.

Hard to make a lot of headway if your system is having a BSOD. :|

 

[imaheadcase]

Its not a BSOD that we are talking about, the program just stops doing tasks. No one even said it was a BSOD..

 

[Smoke]

I was not as clear as I should have been. Let me try again.

The computer was running but showed a notice in the tray area that it had recovered from a BSOD error. BOINC was not running. BOINC seemed to have lost the address of the "computer" and I had to input localhost. Normally that would fix the situation but it did not seem to do the trick. Upon rebooting, things were back to normal.

If this is too far off topic, please excuse and I'll just move along.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Greg, I don't know if your problem is the same as Johan's, headcase's and mine, but the symptoms sure are the same. I tried entering the local host as well. In my case, though, a restart of BOINC will do the trick; no reboot necessary.

 

[dennilfloss]

Something similar happens to me if I leave my BOINC work window open for too long. I have to turn off and restart BOINC Manager but the WUs are still being crunched while it's frozen, according to what I see in Task Manager.