Norton AV scan seems to have interfered with BOINC
18 Jun 2005 15:43:50 UTC
Topic 189371
(moderation:
In the early hours of this morning Norton antivirus ran a scheduled scan on one of my computers that is running BOINC for Einstein@Home. That computer is set to "run always". But it seems as if the Einstein@Home work unit that tried to start when AV scan was running got suspended somehow. When I opened the BOINC manager this morning the work units and even the project disappeared and, when I looked on the messages tab, the last message said it was unable to connect. Unfortunately, I didn't think to save the messages before I had BOINC exit (does it save those messages in a log anywhere?). When I started BOINC back up everything was OK except that it estimated it would take 1400+ hours to complete the work unit it was just beginning (but that estimate is becoming more reasonable as it makes progress again). Are there any known problems with BOINC and Norton antivirus? In any case, does anyone have an explanation for this behavior and how to prevent it in the future?
Norton AV scan seems to have interfered with BOINC
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I have a rule, never run a virus scan with anything else running and I am happy no problems.....
Link to Unofficial Wiki for BOINC, by Paul and Friends
Just to counter Fuzzy's
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Just to counter Fuzzy's comments, I run Norton Antivirus 2005 on my machine and it has never caused any issues with boinc (4.25, 4.43 & 4.45) still running during the scan.
But I would take fuzzy's advice and close boinc before running a virus scan since its causing problems.
RE: In the early hours of
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The messages are probably still there, in the messages file. Look for stdoutdae.txt and stderrdae.txt. These are appended to, not overwritten every time BOINC starts.
In stdoutdae.txt, you'll see a blank line followed by "To pause/resume tasks hit CTRL-C, to exit hit CTRL-BREAK".
One thing you can try is to set the virus scanner to ignore files in the BOINC folder and subfolders.
And if the Indexing Service is active, stop it. Or if you actually need/use it, at least change the advanced properties for the BOINC folder to not index it. (Uncheck the box). When the "Confirm attribute changes" prompt pops up, select "apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files".
I'm using NOD32 Antivirus
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I'm using NOD32 Antivirus System, and it never interferes with BOINC, but this could not be said about Windoze firewall. I've put it to sleep, as there's BlackIce on my machine, but the pesky thing just bragged that it "blocked some features of BOINC" at startup for my protection(!), and I had to unblock it manually. BTW this is the first time, and I wonder what nice surprises Windoze keeps in store for me.
Here's another user that has
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Here's another user that has never had any problems with NAV scans while BOINC was running, and I started running BOINC back in beta, about two years ago. Automatic AV scans every Friday night.
It is generally a good idea
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It is generally a good idea to exempt the BOINC directory from the scans. Of course that has nothing do with this particular problem.
BOINC WIKI
BOINCing since 2002/12/8
RE: It is generally a good
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I don't think it's generally a good idea to exempt any directory from AV scans! I would say the better idea would be to cancel automatic scans if you are having problems, then do manual scans, exiting BOINC beforehand.
RE: RE: It is generally a
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Just one or the other? Its better still to keep the automatic scans and also do the manual ones.
Normal A/V operation and autoscans should exclude BOINC and other problem or unnecessary folders. Backup/undelete utilities come to mind. Later (once a week?) suspend BOINC and run a manual scan, this time don't exclude BOINC and the other stuff.
RE: RE: It is generally a
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The problem is the workunit files tend to be almost random data and they occasional line up in the signature that the virus scanner is looking for. Even though there is no virus.
BOINC WIKI
BOINCing since 2002/12/8
RE: In the early hours of
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What is probably going on is that the hard drive is being tied up by the antivirus, preventing Einstein@home from launching in time to receive the connection BOINC generates to control it and therefore causing the error. I have noticed this behavior occasionally when booting my laptop when BOINC needs to contact any project for some reason because the last attempt before the computer's shutdown or reboot failed. In this case, my slow laptop hard drive was tied up by the booting process. Maybe BOINC should allow us to set the delay from startup until the time it opens a connection so that slow hard drives (like those found in laptops) and high hard disk utilization won't bother it so much.
Here is my suggestion as to how to correct this error when it happens:
*Tell the antivirus to pause.
*Wait until the hard drive activity from the antivirus ceases.
*Launch the BOINC manager.
*Unpause the antivirus. Einstein@home will be able to do significant amount of work during this time because its bottleneck is in the CPU, while the antivirus is often waiting for the hard disk to read before it can perform any scanning.
If you are wanting to spend some serious cash to help mitigate this problem, then follow these tips:
*Buy a hard drive that supports some form of command queuing. This allows the hard drive to reorder commands in the queue in order to improve efficiency. If you are using a serial ATA drive, then make sure that your host bus adaptor supports the same kind of command queuing because serial ATA supports the older tagged command queuing (TCQ) from parallel ATA and the newer native command queuing (NCQ) that is exclusive to it. Older chipsets that present an emulated parallel ATA interface can only support TCQ, while newer chipsets that can present a native serial ATA interface and an emulated parallel ATA interface to the operating system can support both.
*Set up RAID on your computer.
These tips are extremely expensive if you want to upgrade your computer and usually are best followed when you are building a new computer. These tips will also help speed up servers and gaming machines.