Is there any work for Android? Out of curiosity, I installed BOINC on my Galaxy S9 and connected to Rosetta, but I get the message "Rosetta for portable devices needs 1907,35 MB RAM but only 1805,47 MB is available for use". As far as I know, the Galaxy S9 has 4 GB of RAM and was/still is quite a flagship smartphone (currently rank 44 at Antutu), so what is the problem here? I just think that I have a small power brick laying around collecting dust, while it could be used for something good.

There are currently 13121 such tasks available, but that number has recently been changing drastically during each day.

I suspect that main thing you need to do is to tell BOINC that it has permission to use a higher fraction of the 4 GB of the memory - BOINC usually tries to leave much of the memory free for other programs.

Is there any work for Android? Out of curiosity, I installed BOINC on my Galaxy S9 and connected to Rosetta, but I get the message "Rosetta for portable devices needs 1907,35 MB RAM but only 1805,47 MB is available for use". As far as I know, the Galaxy S9 has 4 GB of RAM and was/still is quite a flagship smartphone (currently rank 44 at Antutu), so what is the problem here? I just think that I have a small power brick laying around collecting dust, while it could be used for something good.

There are currently 13121 such tasks available, but that number has recently been changing drastically during each day.

I suspect that main thing you need to do is to tell BOINC that it has permission to use a higher fraction of the 4 GB of the memory - BOINC usually tries to leave much of the memory free for other programs.

Well, that was a quick answer! I feel very dumb now, because it was just as easy as going to the settings in BOINC and changing exactly that option. I somehow misread it the first time as "leave xx % of the memory free" instead of the "can use xx % of the memory", so I set it to the lowest amount instead of the highest.

As soon as I changed that, it started to download WUs and I am now contributing. Still got the mesasge that I don't have anough RAM though, but I think I can ignore that now.

Is there any work for Android? Out of curiosity, I installed BOINC on my Galaxy S9 and connected to Rosetta, but I get the message "Rosetta for portable devices needs 1907,35 MB RAM but only 1805,47 MB is available for use". As far as I know, the Galaxy S9 has 4 GB of RAM and was/still is quite a flagship smartphone (currently rank 44 at Antutu), so what is the problem here? I just think that I have a small power brick laying around collecting dust, while it could be used for something good.

There are currently 13121 such tasks available, but that number has recently been changing drastically during each day.

I suspect that main thing you need to do is to tell BOINC that it has permission to use a higher fraction of the 4 GB of the memory - BOINC usually tries to leave much of the memory free for other programs.

Well, that was a quick answer! I feel very dumb now, because it was just as easy as going to the settings in BOINC and changing exactly that option. I somehow misread it the first time as "leave xx % of the memory free" instead of the "can use xx % of the memory", so I set it to the lowest amount instead of the highest.

As soon as I changed that, it started to download WUs and I am now contributing. Still got the mesasge that I don't have anough RAM though, but I think I can ignore that now.

That looks likely to SOMETIMES be enough. It now gets past the first test for insufficient memory, and is therefore able to do enough to see if what the task is doing will eventually reach the limit or not.

Is there any work for Android? Out of curiosity, I installed BOINC on my Galaxy S9 and connected to Rosetta, but I get the message "Rosetta for portable devices needs 1907,35 MB RAM but only 1805,47 MB is available for use". As far as I know, the Galaxy S9 has 4 GB of RAM and was/still is quite a flagship smartphone (currently rank 44 at Antutu), so what is the problem here? I just think that I have a small power brick laying around collecting dust, while it could be used for something good.

There are currently 13121 such tasks available, but that number has recently been changing drastically during each day.

I suspect that main thing you need to do is to tell BOINC that it has permission to use a higher fraction of the 4 GB of the memory - BOINC usually tries to leave much of the memory free for other programs.

Well, that was a quick answer! I feel very dumb now, because it was just as easy as going to the settings in BOINC and changing exactly that option. I somehow misread it the first time as "leave xx % of the memory free" instead of the "can use xx % of the memory", so I set it to the lowest amount instead of the highest.

As soon as I changed that, it started to download WUs and I am now contributing. Still got the mesasge that I don't have anough RAM though, but I think I can ignore that now.

That looks likely to SOMETIMES be enough. It now gets past the first test for insufficient memory, and is therefore able to do enough to see if what the task is doing will eventually reach the limit or not.

Maybe I celebrated too early, because now I have to get BOINC to keep working. As soon as I leave the App or turn the screen off, BOINC gets killed. Even if I just leave the tasks-tab, they all stop completely. I already disabled all of Samsung's battery saving options and set it to not being kicked out of the RAM, but it still does somehow.
Either the Samsung has a quite aggressive battery management system or the GAlaxy S9 is an old shabby phone already.

slightly OT: Windows10 seems to LAG when BOINC runs on ALL cores. why?
My setup:
Processor I7 9700k @ 4,5 GHz, no graphics card.
16 GB RAM
The processor has 8 phys. cores
I let the boinc client run on 7 cores, currently 5 run with rosetta 4.12, the other 2 cores run with rosetta mini 3.78

So far so good - as i let my machine run 24/7, i would like to use ALL EIGHT CORES for rosetta.
But when i set the boinc client to 100%, at first i see an 8th process start.

Fine, but after a while Windows10 does strange things.

E.g. when i want to copy a larger file on my HDD, Windows10 seems to wait and wait and wait and not perform the task.
Every now and then Windows10 refuses to do something and just tends to wait.
I don't know WHY this habbens because the rosetta tasks should be in idle low priority anyway.


As soon as i revert to 7 core usage (i put 88% into the boinc client usage), everything returns to normal.



Does anyone else know of this behaviour and how to fix it and let boinc use all processor cores?

greetings from Vienna

Roland Schweiger

[snip]

That looks likely to SOMETIMES be enough. It now gets past the first test for insufficient memory, and is therefore able to do enough to see if what the task is doing will eventually reach the limit or not.

Maybe I celebrated too early, because now I have to get BOINC to keep working. As soon as I leave the App or turn the screen off, BOINC gets killed. Even if I just leave the tasks-tab, they all stop completely. I already disabled all of Samsung's battery saving options and set it to not being kicked out of the RAM, but it still does somehow.
Either the Samsung has a quite aggressive battery management system or the GAlaxy S9 is an old shabby phone already.

Are you leaving it connected to the battery charger whenever BOINC is running? You may need to do so. On mobile phones, BOINC is usually set to require that to keep running.

Looks like you have many access violations. I am not seeing such errors with other people's problem reports. Have you run memtest?

Thanks - have tried both Memtest86 and Windows built in memtest on that host, both came back clean after several passes.
Not sure as to the reason for the errors, for the moment I've stopped this host from taking Rosetta tasks and have put it on WCG til I have a chance to look further.

Seems to be only Rosetta that's affected as other applications (GPUGrid and WCG's MCM) run OK.

[snip]

That looks likely to SOMETIMES be enough. It now gets past the first test for insufficient memory, and is therefore able to do enough to see if what the task is doing will eventually reach the limit or not.

Maybe I celebrated too early, because now I have to get BOINC to keep working. As soon as I leave the App or turn the screen off, BOINC gets killed. Even if I just leave the tasks-tab, they all stop completely. I already disabled all of Samsung's battery saving options and set it to not being kicked out of the RAM, but it still does somehow.
Either the Samsung has a quite aggressive battery management system or the GAlaxy S9 is an old shabby phone already.

Are you leaving it connected to the battery charger whenever BOINC is running? You may need to do so. On mobile phones, BOINC is usually set to require that to keep running.

Yes, charger is connected and screen is off (although there are options to change that in the settings). I now limited the CPU usage to only 4 of the 8 cores, this removed the error message and BOINC keeps working more consistently, although not perfectly. WUs still get stopped in the middle.
This is especially bad if the WUs are maybe at 50% after a few hours and I am starting to use my phone, those hours of work get suspended.

[snip]

Are you leaving it connected to the battery charger whenever BOINC is running? You may need to do so. On mobile phones, BOINC is usually set to require that to keep running.

Yes, charger is connected and screen is off (although there are options to change that in the settings). I now limited the CPU usage to only 4 of the 8 cores, this removed the error message and BOINC keeps working more consistently, although not perfectly. WUs still get stopped in the middle.
This is especially bad if the WUs are maybe at 50% after a few hours and I am starting to use my phone, those hours of work get suspended.

BOINC also has settings for Suspend when computer is on battery, Suspend when computer is in use, and Suspend when non-BOINC CPU usage is above.

Have you turned all of these off?

Do you disconnect the charger when you are using the phone?

BOINC is usually able to restart properly after it is suspended. Does it shut down BOINC completely, instead of just suspending it?

You might try limiting CPU use by BOINC to 3 cores, in order to leave more memory for phone use.

Having other applications get sluggish is part of why the default BOINC settings are to not run at maximums. Memory contention and swapfile still get you, even given that BOINC tasks are low priority. By reducing your resources for BOINC, you are leaving some for the active user.

---

Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Seems to me, at least when you're dealing with 8+ cores and SMT, that leaving at least one thread open for overhead is a good idea, particularly if you're planning to use the machine as a normal desktop. I have a Ryzen 7 1700 cranking away (8 cores/16 threads) running Linux, and I find that it's best to use 14 cores for Rosetta, one core and the GPU for GPUGRID, and one core for overhead. Otherwise, the system bogs down noticeably.

Seems to me, at least when you're dealing with 8+ cores and SMT, that leaving at least one thread open for overhead is a good idea, particularly if you're planning to use the machine as a normal desktop. I have a Ryzen 7 1700 cranking away (8 cores/16 threads) running Linux, and I find that it's best to use 14 cores for Rosetta, one core and the GPU for GPUGRID, and one core for overhead. Otherwise, the system bogs down noticeably.

You only mentioned one of the possible narrow places limiting how many cores you can use; otherwise, correct.

You may need to watch the total amount of memory, and the shared path from the CPU to main memory as well, and possibly others.

Thanks - have tried both Memtest86 and Windows built in memtest on that host, both came back clean after several passes.
Not sure as to the reason for the errors, for the moment I've stopped this host from taking Rosetta tasks and have put it on WCG til I have a chance to look further.

Seems to be only Rosetta that's affected as other applications (GPUGrid and WCG's MCM) run OK.

Your Ryzen 9 and i7-3630QM don't have enough RAM to run most of your cores & threads.
You need 1.3GB RAM per Task running (present Tasks are using much less, but others do use that much).

Even if you have that much RAM, you then need to make it available for BOINC to use. Your accout, Computing preferences,

Memory
    When computer is in use, use at most 95 %
When computer is not in use, use at most 95 %
Leave non-GPU tasks in memory while suspended (not selected)

I have no issues running all cores & threads on my systems. The Rosetta applications run at idle priority, and they don't work the CPU nearly as hard as other applications do when they are running.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

Where do we post initialization and login questions, please?

https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_help_desk.php

---

Help, my tagline is missing..... Help, my tagline is......... Help, m........ Hel.....

slightly OT: Windows10 seems to LAG when BOINC runs on ALL cores. why?
My setup:
Processor I7 9700k @ 4,5 GHz, no graphics card.
16 GB RAM
The processor has 8 phys. cores
I let the boinc client run on 7 cores, currently 5 run with rosetta 4.12, the other 2 cores run with rosetta mini 3.78

So far so good - as i let my machine run 24/7, i would like to use ALL EIGHT CORES for rosetta.
But when i set the boinc client to 100%, at first i see an 8th process start.

Fine, but after a while Windows10 does strange things.

E.g. when i want to copy a larger file on my HDD, Windows10 seems to wait and wait and wait and not perform the task.
Every now and then Windows10 refuses to do something and just tends to wait.
I don't know WHY this habbens because the rosetta tasks should be in idle low priority anyway.


As soon as i revert to 7 core usage (i put 88% into the boinc client usage), everything returns to normal.



Does anyone else know of this behaviour and how to fix it and let boinc use all processor cores?

greetings from Vienna

Roland Schweiger

Sure. You need to allow at least one free core/thread on most operating systems or the system will slow down its processing of all tasks.

Often it is useful to have 2 idle threads. On a high core/thread cpu you want to have 4 free.

One rule of thumb is set the percentage of cpu cores/threads that your projects use to 90%. On smaller core/thread count systems I sometimes have to set it as low as 75% to get a thread free.

Tom M

---

Help, my tagline is missing..... Help, my tagline is......... Help, m........ Hel.....

Sure. You need to allow at least one free core/thread on most operating systems or the system will slow down its processing of all tasks.

Often it is useful to have 2 idle threads. On a high core/thread cpu you want to have 4 free.

Where as i'm running using all 6 cores & 12 threads with no impact on system performance or responsiveness and next to no detriment to processing times; only 2min difference between Run time & CPU time over 8 hours of processing (and using all 6 cores on the system with HyperThreading turned off. No problems).

So far so good - as i let my machine run 24/7, i would like to use ALL EIGHT CORES for rosetta.
But when i set the boinc client to 100%, at first i see an 8th process start.

Fine, but after a while Windows10 does strange things.

E.g. when i want to copy a larger file on my HDD, Windows10 seems to wait and wait and wait and not perform the task.
Every now and then Windows10 refuses to do something and just tends to wait.
I don't know WHY this habbens because the rosetta tasks should be in idle low priority anyway.

In your account, computing preferences, try

Memory
    When computer is in use, use at most 95%
When computer is not in use, use at most 95%
Leave non-GPU tasks in memory while suspended (unselected)
             Page/swap file: use at most 75%

You might have enough memory, but if you don't let BOINC use it then it will have problems.

---

Grant
Darwin NT

slightly OT: Windows10 seems to LAG when BOINC runs on ALL cores. why?
<snip>
E.g. when i want to copy a larger file on my HDD, Windows10 seems to wait and wait and wait and not perform the task.
Every now and then Windows10 refuses to do something and just tends to wait.
I don't know WHY this habbens because the rosetta tasks should be in idle low priority anyway.

Its the HDD. You have tasks writing to disk and you are trying to copy a file at the same time. The read/write heads can't be in two places at once. Its not as noticeable with an SSD but still happens when tasks first start as they unzip data into the slot directory. Another thing you could adjust would be the checkpoint interval to 300 seconds to reduce some of the regular writes to the disk.

Given you have 16 threads on a i7 9900k and Rosetta can use up to 1.3GB of memory per task you could also be paging. 16GB isn't enough to keep everything in memory so something has to get paged out to disk. You should be able to see this in Task Manager. That might also explain why when you set CPU usage to 88% in BOINC that it doesn't happen. If it is paging you can use an app_config file to limit how many tasks run at once, leave BOINC set at 88%, or add more memory.

---

BOINC blog

[snip]

That looks likely to SOMETIMES be enough. It now gets past the first test for insufficient memory, and is therefore able to do enough to see if what the task is doing will eventually reach the limit or not.

Maybe I celebrated too early, because now I have to get BOINC to keep working. As soon as I leave the App or turn the screen off, BOINC gets killed. Even if I just leave the tasks-tab, they all stop completely. I already disabled all of Samsung's battery saving options and set it to not being kicked out of the RAM, but it still does somehow.
Either the Samsung has a quite aggressive battery management system or the GAlaxy S9 is an old shabby phone already.

Are you leaving it connected to the battery charger whenever BOINC is running? You may need to do so. On mobile phones, BOINC is usually set to require that to keep running.

Yes, charger is connected and screen is off (although there are options to change that in the settings). I now limited the CPU usage to only 4 of the 8 cores, this removed the error message and BOINC keeps working more consistently, although not perfectly. WUs still get stopped in the middle.
This is especially bad if the WUs are maybe at 50% after a few hours and I am starting to use my phone, those hours of work get suspended.

I run BOINC on Android Oreo (HTC 10) and Pie (HTC U12+) just fine. You can try out HTC power to give, it's based on a somewhat older version of BOINC and has had some classic BOINC features removed (it does not cache work, instead, it behaves more like FAH, It does not allow you to crunch on battery power. Oh, and it only allows you to attach project from its limited predefined list, it also does not support "no new tasks" or suspend individual tasks or projects, which baffles me), but it works well with Android (it even has a setting to prevent your battery from overheating, which is vital for longevity) so I live with the cut-down-ess.
One issue with HTC Power to give and Android Pie and later is that you still need to open up Power to Give before you turn off the screen, else it won't run. Oh, and you need to enable the persistent notification to prevent it from being killed.

Problem: Rosetta for Portable Devices queue has run dry.

Question: Are the tasks the same between the 3 queues (Rosetta, Rosetta Mini and Rosetta for Portable Devices) or are they smaller for the Portable Devices?

---

MarksRpiCluster

Anyone else seeing this behavior? (follow link above to message 92354)
After resuming apparently normal function for 8-10 days, the screensaver is displaying this blank template the past day and a half.
Eric