Strange statistics of BOINC Manager

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs)]

Binary package hint: boinc-manager

Not so serious, but annoying... The statistics are pretty weird, and especially at the end of a job (work unit?). Basically it will be working along pretty steadily, and the progress statistics make pretty good sense, but then it will get all weird. I've seen it frozen at some high percentage like 99.860% for very long periods of time. Today I was watching it finish one so I could shut down the machine, and it hung there for many minutes. Then it started counting PAST 100%. I wasn't sure what it thought it was doing, but it eventually got up to around 105% of completion--and suddenly fell back to 100% and sent the results in. There should be some kind of sanity check there...

This may be related to the specific project that I'm sanctioned to support, the World Community Grid. I have to note that the implementation of that particular project seems rather suspect. I sure hope their results are better than the visible part they show to the donors. For example, their system very often tosses results so the progress graph is like a flight of stairs. I'm glad to help them in fighting cancer and so forth, but it feels like a big waste when so many of the donated hours are just tossed away. Also, their system used to be really bad about assigning tasks that a particular system couldn't even handle, so the job would just freeze while waiting for memory and the project needed to be reset--again tossing away some of the donated work. (They may have fixed that last problem, since I haven't seen it in a while.)

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

Thank you for your bug report.
I'm using World Community Grid myself, but also other projects.
However, I'm not monitoring the processes in boinc manager closely.

It would be interesting, if it happens also for other projects, like Rosetta for example.

However, I agree that boinc-manager itself should probably never report more than 100%. On the other hand, this might be just sort of a "notification" that the project itself behaves badly when reporting progress.

[shanen (Shannon Jacobs) (shanen)]

Still incomplete? What more is needed?

Anyway, a couple of additional glitches I should have remembered to report. The first one is on the edge of the statistics problem, but may still be related to the implementation of the specific World Community Grid project. That's a consistent slippage in the predicted completion time on one Ubuntu machine. Essentially, it always underestimates how long it will take by about 40%. The slippage is pretty consistent, and doesn't seem to have any relation to what else is running, or if nothing else has been loaded since booting. It seems clear that however BOINC is benchmarking itself on this machine, it always gets it wrong.

The other glitch is highly widespread, and I can confirm that it affects the BOINC Manager on Ubuntu, Windows (both XP and 2000) and whether the client is running in English or Japanese. The problem is that the window settings are usually lost. I would assume it is a feature, not a bug, except that sometimes it does retain the settings. That's things like the window size of BOINC Manager and the widths of the columns. However, as far as I can recall, it always remembers the last selected tab correctly.

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

I'm marking it Triaged, since there should be enough info now, thank you.
However, it seems like you should forward it to the WCG staff, since it appears to be specific to this project.

The window settings issue seems to be something different.

Maybe this is fixed in boinc 6 already? I'm currently evaluating 6.2.12-1 from Debian unstable for Intrepid - which you should be able to install on Hardy, too.
You can get the binaries from https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/boinc once it's synced and built (there is 6.2.7-1 available currently).

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

could you please try if the problem is still alive with a new boinc version? thanks

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for boinc (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]