I'm allowed to crunch on a number of internal machines at a customer site, provided I avoid business hours. In the past Mini was not pausing even when BOINC thought it was supposed to, so I gave up and used app_info.xml to lock those machines down to just Rosetta Beta jobs.

I just noticed most/all of those machines have completed all tasks, and the Messages tab is reporting:

Sending scheduler request: To fetch work. Requesting 345600 seconds of work, ...
Scheduler request succeeded: got 0 new tasks
Message from server: No work sent

repeatedly.

Is Rosetta Beta gone?

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There are probably way more Mini than BETA, and as far as I know, BOINC sorta sends a "random" set to you, and if that set happens to be Mini, it won't send them to you. So it's more of a probability issue.

And, BOINC really shouldn't bother with business as far as CPU power is concerned. The only thing that affects performance wise is the memory that it uses (~500MB on dual core: 200-250MB per core). But any machine with 1GB or more should be more than fine running BOINC in the background.

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Alan, the way the scheduler works, it sorta keeps a list of the next few hundred tasks to be sent out. Each request comes in, it reviews the list for any tasks that might fit the bill. It's not finding any. Doesn't mean there are none, just none in the next few hundred.

But yes, work designating the beta application comes and goes. There doesn't seem to be much right now. But may be again in the future.

Which BOINC version were you having trouble with Mini stopping when BOINC suspended tasks? I haven't heard of that problem for a while. I thought it was fixed in the current BOINC versions?

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I have problems with suspending work on any of the 6.6.x clients which I have reported to BOINC devs many times. It is a known issue. However, I do not have this problem on 6.4.7.

Chilean:
The issues with pausing crunching on the business machines during work hours are:

• The machines are Dell Optiplex GX620 small form-factor desktops, located in conference rooms. As soon as the machine pulls more than a 20% sustained load, the fan speed steps up and people start asking why there is an aircraft taxiway in the room. Unacceptable.
  
  
• While the machines are 3.2GHz Pentium Ds with plenty of RAM, when one core is crunching for Rosetta there is a noticeable increase in lag on intensive actions, IMO (e.g., starting bloatware applications like PowerPoint, clean video playback, etc). Since the typical user of these machines is an administrative assistant working as the driver and scribe during a meeting, it isn't acceptable to have anything going on which even might be blamed for complicating their life.
  

Mod.Sense:
Thanks for the explanation, I didn't realize it wouldn't query the entire pending queue.

Hammeh:
Interesting. Since I have machines with no work in progress, I should be able to switch back to 6.4.7 without any impact. Do you know offhand if I can just run the install to roll back, or do I need to detach, uninstall, do a clean install, and then attach and merge?

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Hammeh:
Interesting. Since I have machines with no work in progress, I should be able to switch back to 6.4.7 without any impact. Do you know offhand if I can just run the install to roll back, or do I need to detach, uninstall, do a clean install, and then attach and merge?

Well I rolled back a few of my machines to 6.4.7 from 6.6.28 without uninstalling or detaching without any problems. Just exit BOINC and run the previous version installer (such as 6.4.7) and it will remove any of the files it does not need anyway. There is no need to detach from the project, therefore after it is installed and running the project should still be listed in the projects tab.

Mod.Sense:

Sorry, missed your question about version where BOINC would suspend but Mini just kept running. 5.10.45 and 6.2.18 both gave me problems. That wasn't the only failure mode. As noted in my old post, I also saw cases where the Mini job just kept running forever, and BOINC never showed any progress for the job.

I don't have hours in the day to baby sit never-ending jobs and definitely did not want rock the boat at my customer site with failure-to-suspend, so I just avoided the problem.

Based on Hammeh's comment, I'm going to give Mini with BOINC 6.4.7 a try on the Optiplex box least likely to cause complaints if it fails to suspend, and (if it will run on Win2K) on some older non-production servers. If I can get clean operation, I'll let Mini back into the world.

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Chilean:
The issues with pausing crunching on the business machines during work hours are:

• The machines are Dell Optiplex GX620 small form-factor desktops, located in conference rooms. As soon as the machine pulls more than a 20% sustained load, the fan speed steps up and people start asking why there is an aircraft taxiway in the room. Unacceptable.
  
  
• While the machines are 3.2GHz Pentium Ds with plenty of RAM, when one core is crunching for Rosetta there is a noticeable increase in lag on intensive actions, IMO (e.g., starting bloatware applications like PowerPoint, clean video playback, etc). Since the typical user of these machines is an administrative assistant working as the driver and scribe during a meeting, it isn't acceptable to have anything going on which even might be blamed for complicating their life.
  

That makes a lot of sense now. I thought the PCs were being used for secretary-and-the-like work.

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