Help me optimize my system
9 Jun 2008 16:04:39 UTC
Topic 193713
(moderation:
I have a Windows system running a 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo. I'm getting average of around 33k seconds for my workunits. It seems like my machines keeps getting smoked by Linux systems.
Is there an optimized client I could run for better performance?
Help me optimize my system
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Look at http://einsteinathome.org/node/193660 for the optimized version.
RE: I have a Windows system
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See http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/app_test.php#windows. That will get you in the same ballpark as the Linux systems, but don't expect miracles. Vista in general has more overhead than pretty much any Linux distribution, so on the same hardware, Linux will always be faster (except on the BOINC benchmarks for some reason). There's also an SSE2 Power App for Linux only currently that may be responsible for some of the faster processing of some of your Linux competition. There are no plans on making an SSE2 version for any other platform as they're focusing on creating the application for the next run on S5 data.
RE: That will get you in
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Vista's "overhead" isn't enough cause to lower crunching runtimes. The time shown for WUs is the CPU time - not the start to finish time. Regardless of other processes that are running in the background, the actual work unit time should remain the same. That being said - a Vista system sitting at idle doesn't consume any more CPU cycles than XP does.
I've got the optimized clients running on a Windows XP 64-bit computer and a Fedora 9 64-bit computer. Both have pretty much the same hardware (Q6700, 4GB RAM) but the Windows machine has consistently lower WU runtimes.
@jeffusa - Grab yourself the Windows optimized client. You should get runtimes that drop below 20k.
I installed the optimized
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I installed the optimized app. I was getting around 720 Average work done with the old app. I can't wait to see what the optimized app can do!
I had one of my old systems
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I had one of my old systems overclocked to 2.4GHz, and it was pulling an average of 2000RAC. With your setup, you should be able to pull off similar numbers. :)
Is there a way through some
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Is there a way through some remote place that I can push out the optimized app to all my hosts
Is it worth the time to do it?
Will the optimized apps be auto-deployed once they are out of 'beta' phase?
RE: Is there a way through
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One of the drawbacks to optimized apps is they don't auto-update. The "stock" apps do.
When S5R4 comes along your S5R3 app will no longer be getting any work once all the wu are processed (approx 90 days according to the server status page). You will need a newer app for S5R4.
BOINC blog
The server status page
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The server status page projection is a bit off, Bernd mentioned in another post that we can expect the transition to S5R4 already in August.
CU
H-B
RE: Is there a way through
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Deploying beta test and power user apps is quite simple if you have all your hosts on a LAN and you create a network share on one of them. Just unpack the contents of the beta test archive onto the network share. If you don't have a network share on a LAN you can use a pen (USB) drive instead.
From each host on which you want to run the beta app, you just need to
* Stop the boinc client
* Wait 5 seconds
* Restart the BOINC client
The five seconds is important to make sure that BOINC has properly stopped before attempting to restart it. I have icons on the desktop for doing the job and I believe I've noticed a problem if I click the restart icon too soon after clicking the stop icon. I've never had a problem if I count to five :-).
The above is for Windows with BOINC running as a service but I do exactly the same for Linux anyway.
The time per host is almost negligible. It mounts up if you are doing 100 hosts :-). If there is improved performance, that makes it quite worthwhile.
Quite often beta test apps will eventually become the next stock app by which time there is usually another beta or power user app in the works. The most common transition I do is from one beta to the next which is why I made the comment about allowing the app_info.xml app to be overwritten. It's actually a lot more difficult to go from a beta app to the stock app as you have to think about the tasks in your cache which have been "branded" with the version number of the previous beta.
There is no easy way for a new stock app to own these tasks once the app_info.xml file has gone. Just removing the app_info.xml file will make those "previously branded" tasks error out. Your only real option is to allow your cache to drain (or abort the excess tasks) before attempting to go back to a stock app.
A new beta will inherit them with no problem whatsoever, since the logic to do so is in the new app_info.xml file. Even partly crunched tasks are fine, as long as there is no change in the format of the checkpoint file. I'm sure Bernd will tell you if there is a change in checkpoint format. There hasn't been one for quite a while now.
Cheers,
Gary.
It looks like it is working.
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It looks like it is working. My computer is showing 1522 average work done for BOINC. This is on a computer I use pretty heavily during the work week so I'm probably getting close to the max.