Possible Answers to some of your Questions

You would have to have been totally not paying attention to have missed the fact that the servers are having issues at the moment. However if you think about the error messages you are receiving and look at how your own machines are behaving you should be able to work out for yourself a few important details. This might prevent you from taking some rather silly actions or making some rather silly statements in your frustration.

Yes, no doubt everyone is frustrated to some degree but if you think calmly about what is going on you are much less likely to give yourself a heart attack :).

Firstly, you've all seen your own client's messages and the large volume of identical stuff that people insist on posting as well. They all indicate a server problem and not a client problem. In other words there is nothing you can do to your client that is going to change things. So things like detaching, resetting, uninstalling, manually updating ad infinitum, etc are essentially a complete waste of time.

One of the things that perplexes a lot of people is "why do some machines/users seem to be largely unaffected and other machines just can't get action going at all?" I believe the reason for this is linked to whether or not a machine needs new large data file(s) or not. I have many machines that don't need new large data files at the moment and so they are doing just as Pooh Bear has mentioned a couple of times, ie downloading and uploading results without problems. I have other machines that do not get any new work. I believe that this is because they need some form of database lookup to decide a new large data file and that something of this nature is failing and so - no more work.

Secondly, many people are complaining that they can't upload results. If you are worried about this, here is what I have worked out with a little bit of experimenting. On the basis that the problems are connected in some way with downloading new large data files, I decided to break the connection between downloading and uploading so that they are not both being attempted (and both failing) at the same time. All I did was set "No new tasks" on an affected machine, and then "update" the EAH project on that machine. BOINC then tries the upload only without the request for new work. This seems to succeed in about 100% of the cases. After clearing the stuck uploads, I simply re-enable work requests. I still don't get work but at least dozens of uploads are successfully reported, with quite a few examples of "ALREADY Reported" messages too :).

Thirdly, a few people are complaining quite vocally about a lack of information. Statements about "just a line or two" being needed, or "the developers need to wake up" or "worst project for communication" or "the servers must be hacked" or "server status all green - what rubbish", etc, tend to fly about from time to time. Here are my thoughts on this.

If "Just a line or two would suffice" then simply read what the server tells you each time a transaction fails. The messages are actually quite informative if you think about them. Oh, I see, you really meant a page or three giving much fuller "blow by blow" descriptions of what is happening all the time. I would have thought it would be pretty obvious that this problem, whatever it is, is quite intractible and until all the facets of it have been fully investigated it's just about impossible to give you a deep and meaningful report without wasting a lot more time and perhaps indulging in speculation about possible scenarios which ultimately turn out to be wrong anyway. If you start trying to give short "update" reports, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will start wingeing for the next one shortly after the previous one was given. The staff resource to manage this rather nasty ongoing situation is quite small and should be left alone to get the job done.

Much has been commented about the server status page. Here are my thoughts on this. Green means that the hardware is powered and that at least one process of the type indicated is running. Take validation for example. There are two different types of results (S5RI and the old S5R1) so two different programs are needed. Depending on how many results are being returned, multiple instances of the validator program may be needed to handle the load. Of course, each extra instance of the validator program chews up more RAM and more cycles and increases server load. I would think it would be quite feasible in an overstressed server environment, to temporarily shut down the bulk of the running validators to give cycles to other more needy parts of the system. If there is just one validator instance still running (but unable to keep up) the status will still be green but you will see a growing backlog of results to be validated. So what!!! You have to at least give the Devs some credit for trying to juggle things for the better performance of the system as a whole.

As a final comment to some people, please don't keep starting new threads with essentially the same complaint in perhaps a slightly different guise. We all know you are frustrated and we all support your right to express that frustration. But please not in umpteen different threads with pretty much the same winge over and over again. That creates its own level of frustration in others.