FGRPB1G work shortage

Any new indications?

The graph on the front page about granted credit is showing a decline. I assume that is because people are shifting away from FGRB1G to other types of tasks and they are not so generous with credit. This graph is of course a slow indicator due to the validation process.

Hi Bernd,
That description made me wonder if a problem I've seen a couple of times recently might be related in some way.

I have a lot of hosts crunching FGRPB1G.  Most have no peripherals attached - just power and network.  Many have uptimes in the hundreds of days.  I use various scripts to monitor and control them.  In particular, one script visits all hosts every hour and produces quite a detailed log which allows me to track any unusual events or problems that might otherwise go unnoticed for quite a while.

Recently, there have been a number of detections of an issue that seems likely to be caused by something server-side.  It has just happened on two different machines on consecutive days.  It results in spurious 24hr back-offs as shown in these snips from the event logs.  The times are local (UTC+10).

04-Nov-2022 00:44:59 [Einstein@Home] Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.<br />
04-Nov-2022 00:44:59 [Einstein@Home] Requesting new tasks for AMD/ATI GPU<br />
04-Nov-2022 00:45:02 [Einstein@Home] Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks<br />
04-Nov-2022 00:45:02 [Einstein@Home] platform 'x86_64-pc-linux-gnu' not found<br />
04-Nov-2022 00:45:02 [Einstein@Home] Project requested delay of 86400 seconds

and

05-Nov-2022 02:50:00 [Einstein@Home] Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.<br />
05-Nov-2022 02:50:00 [Einstein@Home] Reporting 1 completed tasks<br />
05-Nov-2022 02:50:00 [Einstein@Home] Requesting new tasks for AMD/ATI GPU<br />
05-Nov-2022 02:50:03 [Einstein@Home] Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks<br />
05-Nov-2022 02:50:03 [Einstein@Home] platform 'x86_64-pc-linux-gnu' not found<br />
05-Nov-2022 02:50:03 [Einstein@Home] Project requested delay of 86400 seconds

The events happened in the middle of the night so I didn't get to see the warnings until the script itself had corrected the issue.  The "got 0 new tasks" is fine - it happens regularly - but why should there be a "platform not found" plus a 24hr backoff?

The time between scheduler contacts (last RPC) is monitored by the script.  If that time becomes excessive and there is no detected issue with the host itself, boinccmd is used to force a contact with the project.  This happened in both cases and the backlog of completed work that had piled up was returned.  One had ~50 tasks.

In my case, I'm not unduly bothered by these events.  If it's a bug, it would be good to fix it though :-).  Since I haven't seen other reports about this, maybe it's something specific to my setup.

MilkyWay has/had a similar problem for me as well and others are complaining about it in the forums over there but they have a brand new Admin who's still trying to get up to speed with swapping to a new Server etc