BoincView, Boinc.NET, Boinc Tasks ...
25 May 2010 16:56:45 UTC
Topic 194940
(moderation:
I've been happily using BoincView for several years to manage the dozen computers on my LAN, but recently BoincView has gotten kinda goosey. As support for BoincView appears to have gone away, I tried Boinc.NET and Boinc Tasks.
Both have lots of function and are intuitive to use. But Boinc.NET just about swamped my poor little 3 GHz Pentium D. BoincTasks, on the other hand, seemed to burden the host a bit less than BoincView had.
My instructions-averse male brain was minimally dismayed at not finding instructions easily, but both packages installed easily, although BoincTasks seemed more intuitive and less fussy... after I made a couple of "good guesses" at what needed to be done to start it up. Doubtless, there would have been few problems had I pursued instructions with more sincerity.
I am still in the early hours of usage, but so far I've no regrets at installing BoincTasks.
Stan
BoincView, Boinc.NET, Boinc Tasks ...
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Get BOINCTasks here and the Manual here ... and BOINC.Net
The disclaimer from the BOINC.Net front page is:
So, the developer was up-front with the load ...
I did try and did use BOINC.Net in the early stage of development but have not used either in recent days ... I suppose I should again to see how they are faring ...
RE: The disclaimer from the
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Yes, refreshing candor! :)
With 3GB on a Two-CPU machine with Vista, the memory load did not seem an issue... The meter hovered around 75-80% allocated. However, the CPU utilization percent was far in excess of what BoincView convinced me was acceptable at 10 to 15% ... Boinc.NET regularly exceded 50% and interfered with other desktop activitie, not to mention giving the background Boinc apps a vacation. A 3GHz Pentium-D just doesn't seem adequate for much more than Boinc.NET.
I've used Boinc Tasks now for about half a day and CPU utilization is less than 5% and RAM usage, including a pair of S5GCE jobs and a dozen open web pages is just under 50%. These numbers are for an 11 host LAN running 48 BOINC threads with 7-day cache. So, Boinc Tasks is quite tidy.
One of the features that I think all three programs have is notification when there is no "live Boinc" on remote hosts. That is one of the main values to me, since many of the machines on my LAN are on KVM switches and are located away from my main pathways. With electircal storms, etc. such as we had today, it is nice to know when those remote hosts have gone casters up. During good weather, my cats sometimes rearrange the ethernet cables and upset the ethernet switch operation. (Installation is not yet "cat proofed!" Amd cats like warm places.)
Stan
I've been a long time user of
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I've been a long time user of BoincView, and for some weeks now have been getting to know BoincTasks.
I think it is pretty clear to me that for my installation BoincTasks imposes substantially less overhead on my system than BoincView. This is true even though the maximum update interval BT allows me to set (6 seconds), is something like ten or more times faster than the rate I chose on BV in an attempt to keep system load down.
I also had an easier and cleaner time getting my hosts introduced to BT than on BV.
There are still some bugs, and a few missing BV feature that I miss.
On the plus side, there is an active developer, and a small but active user feedback group he pays attention to. If you liked BV, but are getting worried about the implications of no more development, or find it a bit resource intensive or slow, I suggest giving BT a try, and consider participating in the user forum.
[edited to add: I've never used or looked at Boinc.NET, so make no comparisons to that]
I started up BOINC Tasks and
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I started up BOINC Tasks and unlike you I had trouble getting it to find one of the systems ... all on the same switch and network so not sure what it was ... finally search did not find it I put the last machine in manually and finally coaxed the tool into finding all 5 systems...
It is going to take a bit to get used to the display (as in all new programs) not sure if I will keep it running for a long time or no ... but, it does seem an acceptable replacement for BOINC VIew ... it was sad the developer just disappeared and because he kept the source to himself did a little disservice to the BOINC Community because when he did leave (or die, or whatever) it meant his tool died too ...
Paul D. Buck said: RE: I
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Paul D. Buck said:
Same issue here ... but once I understood how to get the passwords in for the hosts BT found, extrapolating to getting the two missing hosts into the list was a short intuitive hop.
Curiously, I could find no sure logical reason for the failure to find the missed hosts. Maybe caused from the hosts are on three different Windows workgroups. (Guess I should violate the "male rules" and read the instructions! Later, maybe... Tech Support has a phrase, "RTFM"? That phrase as not in vogue when i did Tech Support, but that was 40 years ago and computers were still mysterious to most folks, including a bunch of the COBOL and FORTRAN programmers that I was resposible to help interact with OS/360.) But the manual add host function jumped out at me. I'd have felt worse if my LAN had 100 or so hosts and it missed 90% of them, but missing 2 out of 11 was not an issue.
BT has the management functions I want, and the small load is a happy plus! Now, if I can mute the "ding" when I highlight a task. :)
Stan
It did show me an interesting
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It did show me an interesting situation this morning... a MW task on the GPU taht was taking high CPU ... but, actually it was a "hung" java for DDM... I had to reboot to get the machine working again ...
Sadly, the logging of work does not actually write to a log that I can find ... not sure where it might be writing the data ...
That may be because I seem to still be trying to figure out all the ins and outs of Win7 ... heck, all 4 of my windows computers say they are in the home group, but, looking at W02 at the moment, it shows only two of them ... but the network shows all 5 (have not figured out how to get Snow Leopard to join the home group yet...) All the machines are in the same workgroup ... well, some more fiddling around I am sure ...
Hmm, may have just found the output files ... have to take a harder look at them later ... sure buried in a funny place ...
A few days ago, I
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A few days ago, I said:
BoincTasks seems to be very stable and very capable of what I need. It is an excellent replacement for BoincView for me.
Stan