I have some bad news...

[Poof]

Actually, I was gonna post but then figured I'd let the thread die...

But then I thought it would make a cool nef thread if someone ressurected it!

You all scared poor TuffGuy away. I was hoping to find out what OS he was running (thinking in terms of his possibly using Scheduling and/or the at command). It must be 9x/ME because I expect he might be aware of installing as service which might allow running off-hours.

[EDIT: Come out come out whereever your are TuffGuy... ]

 

[Eltano1]

Can someone (after everybody has cool down) tell me what settings do you have with Outlook?

Thanks and have great weekend

Is not good to fight with teammates

Eltano

 

[TuffGuy]

<< You all scared poor TuffGuy away. I was hoping to find out what OS he was running (thinking in terms of his possibly using Scheduling and/or the at command). It must be 9x/ME because I expect he might be aware of installing as service which might allow running off-hours.

[EDIT: Come out come out whereever your are TuffGuy... ] >>


heh. i've been afraid to post... anyway, they're all running Win2k. not linux.

 

[nagger]

I apologise for jumping in on this but TuffGuy can you install FireDaemon on those PC's?

It's a small app for adding programs has a service in Windows NT/2k and the latest beta works with XP.

You can set the service processor priority to work either in Idle, Normal or Highest Priority.

If u set for instance the Seti console client to the Normal priority it probably won't affect any other program that's running on those machines.

If it doesn't work (I'm not promissing it will) do consider other DC projects that the TeAm is currently in like ECCp-109 and Folding@Home.

If u run into any problems don't hesitate to PM me.

 

[Poof]

/me smacks TuffGuy with a wet noodle!

The fact that you have 2K is what I was trying to find out. What nagger said is correct in that you could set SETI up as a service and then if the machines boot, they would run the client without needing a user logged in. Plus you could schedule it to run only at certain times of the day (assuming the machines stayed on overnight) so as not to affect your users.

I have a feeling though, that you've already taken the clients off by now. But it is something you could consider in the future if the opportunity comes again.

Eltano - I think RaySun2Be mentioned something about turning off the option for "Offline folders". in Outlook to make sure it behaves itself. I remember way back having that on with OL 97/98 when I was dialing into work and what a mess that was. I think the performance issues had something to do with all the synchronization stuff going on. :disgust:

 

[kmmatney]

I'm in a similar situation at work. ECCp and SETI interfere too much with our user's apps. However, I still get decent production using the TA screen saver Duplexer. It can run SETI (CLI version) or ECCp alongside another standard screen saver, or just by itself with a blank screen.

screensaver duplexer

I typically rename the .SCR file to "BlankScreen.scr" and run it as a blank screen (the monitors will eventually power off anyway).

I get over half my ECCp production with this program, and have been using it for 6 months. It has known problems with Windows 98, but works perfectly in Windows NT and Win2000. Hopefully I'll get the Win98 problem solved soon...

Kevin

P.S. - The screensaver duplexer does not yet work with SETIDriver, since it can only launch and close one app at a time (for now). It will run the CLI just fine, but you can't cache workunits.

 

[Assimilator1]

What apps does SETI interfere with?

 

[mechBgon]

I've seen the Outlook-lag problem before, and I'm glad to learn that it can be remedied by disabling Offline Folders. BTW, is there anyone here who has complete mastery of Outlook? It scares me sometimes, with all the stuff they crammed in there.

I was playing Mechwarrior 4: Black Knight until 3AM (at Elite difficulty, of course) with SETI and SETIDriver running. There are some split-second pauses, but I think it has more to do with the AC97 software audio than anything else, judging by the correlation between the pauses and the sounds of my idiot AI lancemates running over streetlights with their 'Mechs, for example (in-city mission).

Out of curiosity I also tried rendering an hourglass in Caligari trueSpace 4.3. The hourglass has 21000+ faces, many of them with reflective/refractive properties of glass, which means lots of work for the CPU. With SETI and SETIDriver running, rendering of a particular view took 57 seconds. With SETI shut off it took 54 seconds. There is a little performance loss there. I think it's safe to say we all have different sensitivities to it. For me, the worst side effect is bad WU times.


edit: ...and I wish I had more PCs so I could be a part of some of TA's other efforts besides SETI. After a while I'll ask if I can run a DC project on my work PC

 

[Rattledagger]

Hmm, let's see if I've got some meaningful input...

Changing the priority with firedaemon has the same effect as using start /high seti.exe
It automatically switches to idle after start...
Since I've never tried setidriver, I can't comment here, but I doubt it can change the thread-priority to 1. If it can, most of the problems would be solved...

On small-scale, it's possible to change the thread-priority manually, on NT atleast bvslice does this job. This can fix some of the problems.
Unfortunaly, I don't know of a program that can be run and automatically change the thread-priority to seti. Someone must probably program this...

I think the main known problems with seti is this:
Outlook: Someone said disabling offline folders fixes this...
Corel-products: I don't know if all or just some...but small scale, manually change priority; larger scale disable seti, run in offline-hours; run another project.
Adaptec Easy Cd Creator; I had some problems I think it was with the mp3-part... Last time I tried easy cd creator, nothing worked... probably not a seti-problem.
win9x; I've heard seti-cmd is eating resources: Fix, reboot; Better fix, get a better os.

More exotic problems...
multi-cpu; running more than 1 seti-instance gives all instances a smp-penalty if not atleast 1 MB cache...
more instances than cpu's; can slow down system. Then increasing instances, you'll reach a point there the system crawls along...
multi-cpu, affinity-locked; I've tested running either 2 seti or seti+genome locked to the same cpu, and sometime the cpu goes to idle... :Q; Fix, don't affinity-lock 2 programs to same cpu, or make sure different priority.

 

[Assimilator1]

Re SETIDriver ,you are right it can't set a thread priority other than low,medium or high.Low is the same as the client default ,now very low would be handy but Ober mentioned it was very complicated to lower the priority below default.

 

[Lithium381]

SETI actually made my system run more stable.....in fact, it wouldn't run at all without seti on......heh, it had my system whipped! But when it was on, i never noticed any slow downs except in games......but now i've upgraded to a 1700+......

 

[Robor]

I'm glad to see the thread has calmed down and I apologize for argueing rather than discussing earlier (that's why I edited my posts). Anyway...

I've experienced 2 problems with the SETI client. On a Win2K machine running Outlook2K there is a "lag/pause/delay" thing. It's a pretty well known and annoying problem. I wasn't aware disabling "Offline Folders" solved it. I'm gonna have to look at my work fleet and see how I've got them configured. I've got to go in and check some stuff for "end of month" so I'll look while I'm there.

The other thing is just one case but on that system WinMX didn't like the cli SETI client. I've got my Mom's PC running WinXP Pro and SETI is installed as a service. When SETI is running and you try to use WinMX it's terrible. It takes several seconds to flip between windows or scroll down a list. Shut down the service and the problem goes away, start it back up and it comes back. I don't use WinMX myself so I don't know if it's a known problem or if it's just something odd with my Mom's machine.

Edit: Funny story about SETI causing problems... I've got the SETI client installed on pretty much every decent PC at work with the exception of our 2000 Server DC and the EDI Production box. I had it running on the EDI box but got tired of hearing about SETI causing problems with it so I removed it. Somehow those SETI related problems continued after the SETI client was removed! One day the EDI guy came and asked me to remove SETI because it was causing problems. I told him I already did - months ago! :Q

 

[TuffGuy]

hmmmmmm, nooooodles..... oh baby....

The Seti client *was* installed as a service. Seti had "low" priority and Wordperfect had "normal" priority. Check my website for the setup that I was using.

 

[Assimilator1]

Robor
One day the EDI guy came and asked me to remove SETI because it was causing problems. I told him I already did - months ago

lol ,what did the idiot say then? ,did he finally realise there was some other problem with it?

Btw re your moms PC ,did you try to run the GUI version? ,it runs at a slightly lower priority & might play nicely with WinMX?