seti and rc5 question

[turtle219]

i have been using seti and rc5 to test the stability of my system and i was just wondering how long doe sit take to complete one data unit on seti and one for rc5? i have done three 6 hour tests and its only half done with one data unit on seti... i have only done 4 packets in rc5... is this too slow?

 

[DarkMajiq]

It depends on the speed of your processor, and on what other programs you have running. Also, for SETI, it depends on what priority you run it at (Low, Normal or High - obviously on Low it will go slower, and faster on High).

 

[turtle219]

how do i check what setting its on? can i change it?
its done 52% on a duron@998 for 19 hours... is that good?

 

[DarkMajiq]

Do you have SETI Driver installed? If not, get it. 52% in 19 hours on a Duron@988 is not good, I can do a WU on this old PII 233@307 in that amount of time fairly easily. If you have SETI Driver, open it up and set priority to Normal or High (I'd suggest Normal, otherwise it will really suck up your CPU power and slow everything else down). If it is already on Normal or High, then I would suggest seeing what programs you have running. Virus scan programs are real resource hogs, as is ICQ, although ICQ alone shouldn't be bad enough to cause that slow time.

EDIT: I don't know much about RC5, and I don't run it, so I can't help you on that count, sorry

 

[turtle219]

i got the driver and it was set on low... but after i set it on high, it doesn't look any faster... i set it to high then saved config... am i doing something wrong?

 

[DarkMajiq]

It's still not going faster? That's odd, because it should. What other programs do you have running? Any virus scanners? Anything else that uses up a huge amount of system resources? Your CPU should really be cranking out those WUs a lot faster... How long did you leave it on High? It will take a while for the time to start going down, it won't start dropping the second you turn it to high.

Oh, and as for saving the config, all it does is it sets the default options for SETI every time you start it up. So if you set it to High and click Save Config, whenever you start up SETI it will be on High priority. You can of course change this by just changing the option and clicking Save Config again.

 

[mechBgon]

Which version of the SETI program do you have? Is it version 3.0, version 3.03, or an older one?

For your system, a good typical workunit time with the latest version (3.03) would be 7 to 8 hours (the workunits themselves are not all the same). The older version 3.0 client had completion times in the 5-hour area, for reasons I'll skip over here. SETI is sensitive to memory bandwidth and therefore runs at its best with no other programs running. If you're running RC5 at the same time, that is probably part of the reason it's taking so long. If you have the SETI screensaver graphics enabled, your times may be doubled! In fact, the fastest version of the SETI client is the CLI version (a simple text-based DOS box version).

It sounds like your primary interest is stability testing, and for that I think that SETI without RC5 will make your CPU work harder, since the CPU will be going full-speed on SETI. SETI makes my RAM get hot, so you can be pretty sure it's pushing the whole memory bus quite hard. If you want to run SETI in the long term, check out the "Team AnandTech" link in my sig, we have a good SETI team. Here's a link to the CLI version and you will probably want to run it with SETISpy so you can look at the setispy.log file in WordPad and see how long the work units took to complete.

As for RC5, the packets themselves may contain anywhere from 1 to 32 work units each. RC5 is not very touchy about other programs, it will just claim whatever CPU cycles are left over by other applications and use them. You can look for lines like these to see what the output is:

[Jan 28 09:23:26 UTC] RC5: Summary: 222 packets (5566.00 stats units)
5.13:55:36.31 - [3,092,710keys/s]

and compare it with your results in the Team AnandTech speed page, which will calculate your ideal RC5 output for you. Just put your CPU MHz in the box.

edit: you can enable screen blanking on the GUI version of SETI in order to increase its efficiency too. The CLI version is still faster but enabling screen blanking after 1 minute will help a lot too. SETISpy gives all kinds of good info and I think it's worth downloading it and trying the CLI version.

 

[turtle219]

i just dled it a few days ago...its 3.03 i think... its going a faster now... got 6 percent done in a few minutes... thaks guys... i don't want to get all crazy into this, just wanted to finish the unit i started..