Octopus Overlords

Yeah, all good here. I pretty much let it run in the background all the time and don't pay attention. Looking now . . . strange. It wasn't working so I stopped it and started it, and voila! Working again. The oldest IT trick in the book.

As a slot fails to get a WU, it backs off each time for a longer interval before rechecking. In the advanced client you can pause/resume slots or your whole machine. When I've noticed I'm idle for more than a few hours, I'll toggle that pause which resets the check-in interval and sometimes gets me chugging along again.

We have cracked the top 3,000 teams and are now in the top 1.2% of all teams.

gbasden wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2020 2:12 am I can't seem to get WUs either. I"ve got a 2080 in my box, but it's idle most of the time.

I'll definitely have times where hours will go by with no assignments. As others have noted, I'll occasionally pause and reset to clear the "next attempt" timer if I see that it's getting long. And CPU units are often few and far between (though for a while there it seemed to be all I was getting).

Now I've got a nice chunky (260,000~ point) GPU work unit going. I ran F@H a very long time ago on a 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbird / GeForce 3 Ti200. For comparison, it took me 380 work units to reach 16,636 points back then (I'm pretty sure they didn't even utilize GPUs in the beginning). I don't know if the point system has scaled linearly or if there have been changes made over the last 19 years, but on this i9-9900K / 2080 Ti system I could theoretically put in over 3,000,000 points per day if I never ran out of WUs (or played any games).

Damn, son.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2020 5:11 pmDamn, son.

And on the plus side it's unseasonably cold and windy here in Michigan this week, so my computer is keeping my room about 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house! Killing two birds with one stone!

I had to take it off of two systems that were running it, as it was running them too hot and they have some very old (8-10 years) components.

Updated client available today. Some bug fixes, security updates, and you can now explicitly choose the COVID-19 project as your priority.

Interesting. the new client feels a bit... faster.

According to the client, my daily output is now over 220K points. It used to be 140K.

Yeah, mine went up a bit, too.

We are now in the top 1% of teams (#2507 out of 251841 as of this post), thanks in part to BooTx's world-eating machine having joined. No worries that we'll climb all that much higher, though. The 100th team has 4.2 billion points, more than 100x our total.

Also of note is Max Peck climbing up the ranks, at #5 on the team, likely moving to #4 soon.

We've crossed 30 million points, and are closing in on 3,000 WUs.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 10:07 am We are now in the top 1% of teams (#2507 out of 251841 as of this post), thanks in part to BooTx's world-eating machine having joined. No worries that we'll climb all that much higher, though. The 100th team has 4.2 billion points, more than 100x our total.

Also of note is Max Peck climbing up the ranks, at #5 on the team, likely moving to #4 soon.

We've crossed 30 million points, and are closing in on 3,000 WUs.

Max Peck now solidly in 3rd where he's likely to remain. Team has crossed 55 million points, and 4,000 WUs. We're in the top 0.85% of teams and hovering right there.

Say, do you have a reasonably-good gaming GPU? If not, do you have a quad-core or higher processor sitting idle much of the time? Join us! It's pretty simple to get the app running in a manner that doesn't interfere with your gaming, and *checks notes* COVID-19 is still kicking our collective asses. Team ID is 241653.

Wouldn't it be cool if they gave 1,000 points to whoever finds the COVID cure?

i feel the odds of finding it this way are slightly better than the old SETI alien search

The units with no actionable result are important in this case, too!

Sorry I'm late to the party. I lend my PC to the cause. I guess my name won't show up in the team list until the client submits a finished job?

raydude wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2020 8:52 am Sorry I'm late to the party. I lend my PC to the cause. I guess my name won't show up in the team list until the client submits a finished job?

That's right. Once you submit your first WU, then you'll show after the next stats update. Those come in around every hour, I believe.

Zaxxon wrote:

raydude wrote: ↑Thu May 07, 2020 8:52 am Sorry I'm late to the party. I lend my PC to the cause. I guess my name won't show up in the team list until the client submits a finished job?

That's right. Once you submit your first WU, then you'll show after the next stats update. Those come in around every hour, I believe.

I see you in the list now, with your first 2 WUs. Thanks for joining!

Is it possible to be a member of more than one F@H team at the same time?

Max Peck wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 5:08 pm Is it possible to be a member of more than one F@H team at the same time?

Only if you have multiple computers, in which case each install could be pointed at a different team. I believe you can only have points from one computer go to one team.

BooTx, you ok? I noticed I've been catching up to you, and... that's weird.

It looks like BooTx hasn't had a client running or submitted a WU for the last week.

The reason that I was asking about being on muliple teams at the same time is that I was curious about why kraken's output had tapered off. Looking at his stats, it appeared that his WUs are being credited to two teams, Octopus Overlords and DAIN Studios. That seemed strange given that the stats showed that he had no active clients for the DAIN Studios team.

I'm really frustrated. I can't seem to get the client to perform. I've got the top end GPU and currently it's giving me a 2 day ETA to finish that WU. I know my GPU is fine given that it's running games with no issues. I'm at 3 PCs working on this, and the server and my SurfaceBook 2 with a dedicated GPU are churning all day, and yet I don't seem to be processing much. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

gbasden wrote:I'm really frustrated. I can't seem to get the client to perform. I've got the top end GPU and currently it's giving me a 2 day ETA to finish that WU. I know my GPU is fine given that it's running games with no issues. I'm at 3 PCs working on this, and the server and my SurfaceBook 2 with a dedicated GPU are churning all day, and yet I don't seem to be processing much. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

What's the estimated point count for the WU? Not all are created equal. If you have a kick-ass card, it will still take a long time, you'll just receive WUs worth more points. What's your total points-per-day? My main box which has a 1060 6 GB and i7 is around 400k points/day for reference.

It might also depend on how you've set up the "power" options for the client. In order to keep the GPU busy, I had to configure the client to run at medium or full power "while I'm working" otherwise it would just never detect that the GPU was idle. Even with this setting, it doesn't noticeably impact the GPU performance while playing games or whatever because the client seems to have a lower priority than other applications.

From the stats, it looks like you're grinding out a lot of WUs, but not getting much in the way of points for them.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2020 3:54 pm

gbasden wrote:I'm really frustrated. I can't seem to get the client to perform. I've got the top end GPU and currently it's giving me a 2 day ETA to finish that WU. I know my GPU is fine given that it's running games with no issues. I'm at 3 PCs working on this, and the server and my SurfaceBook 2 with a dedicated GPU are churning all day, and yet I don't seem to be processing much. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

What's the estimated point count for the WU? Not all are created equal. If you have a kick-ass card, it will still take a long time, you'll just receive WUs worth more points. What's your total points-per-day? My main box which has a 1060 6 GB and i7 is around 400k points/day for reference.

It's currently reporting 32,646 points per day on a core I9 with a 2080ti. Last night it was reporting a little over 200k per day.

Yeah, that's not right.

Max Peck wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2020 4:29 pm It might also depend on how you've set up the "power" options for the client. In order to keep the GPU busy, I had to configure the client to run at medium or full power "while I'm working" otherwise it would just never detect that the GPU was idle. Even with this setting, it doesn't noticeably impact the GPU performance while playing games or whatever because the client seems to have a lower priority than other applications.

From the stats, it looks like you're grinding out a lot of WUs, but not getting much in the way of points for them.

I'm set to full power and while I'm working. /shrug?

I hope BooTx is OK! He's been offline for a month and a half from the group, after being the clear leader prior.

Team stat update: 9,148 WUs completed, 135M points, top 0.7% of all teams.

I noticed that. I also hope he's okay. Maybe the same thing happened to him that just happened to me. I fried my video card. I'll be back on the team Friday at the latest, the new card is supposed to arrive Thursday.

Yikes! What did you get to replace it?

An MSI Ventus XS OC edition 2060. Not only could I not afford what I wanted to get, finding anything in stock that wasn't wildly inflated in price was a struggle. The card should be arriving today by 9PM.

I look forward to you eventually catching me and my 1060, and curing COVID-19.

Well, while winning is not really the goal, I have to admit I felt a brief thrill at moving to second place. I mean I was in the SETI@home for I don't even know how long, and we never found anything. I just like to be a helper.

My PC is dead. Long live the PC! My old rig died last night, and since my wife really needs a PC ASAP for her classes, I had to go buy whatever was on the shelf at our local BadBuy. So, of course, I bit the bullet and bought https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-rog-g ... Id=6401068 this. Not what I wanted to do, but I needed something quickly. So I re-installed F@H, fired it up, and thought somebody just started a vacuum cleaner. The rig had been whisper quiet up until then. I'm interested to see what it does in the next hour or so.

Formix wrote: ↑Fri Dec 11, 2020 3:28 pm My PC is dead.

PSU or SSD?

Neither. I'm assuming either a processor or mobo failure. There was nothing obvious, it just did the power up for half a second and power down thing. I didn't put a meter on the PSU, but I did the paperclip thing and it started just fine. Swapped out ram, did everything I could think of. I may test it out now that I have time and think about building a new PC later. I have one of the original Alienware "alien head" PC towers that I love and just can't let go of.

Formix wrote: ↑Sat Dec 12, 2020 6:48 am Neither. I'm assuming either a processor or mobo failure.

unless the thermal paste completely dried up and the CPU overheated, processor failures are exceedingly rare, and motherboard failures are almost entirely due to bad capacitors. if your mobo capacitors are fine, i'm going to hazard a guess it actually is the PSU (performs fine with no load, but is no longer up to spec) - but post your findings when you get around to them.

Formix wrote: ↑Sat Dec 12, 2020 6:48 am Neither. I'm assuming either a processor or mobo failure. There was nothing obvious, it just did the power up for half a second and power down thing. I didn't put a meter on the PSU, but I did the paperclip thing and it started just fine. Swapped out ram, did everything I could think of. I may test it out now that I have time and think about building a new PC later. I have one of the original Alienware "alien head" PC towers that I love and just can't let go of.

The paperclip thing isn't very reliable. I've tested PSUs at work that could spin fans up with no problem but not be able to handle the load of the full system.