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sigh... 20+ hours of work thrown out at shutdown

sigh... 20+ hours of work thrown out at shutdown

Questions and Answers : Windows : sigh... 20+ hours of work thrown out at shutdown
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old_user20587

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Message 43876 - Posted: 26 Feb 2012, 1:59:56 UTC

copy of the post @ http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=7325#42750

sigh, basically annoying but I'm not sure if there's anything anyone can do about this due to the way windows operates.

I run various BOINC projects, among them is the climatepredictation.net . Now climateprediction as many know has really large workunits, the kind that take hundreds of hours to process and travel back to the server with trickle updates. Unfortunately because the length of time is so long to process these, it's really unfortunate when something occurs to disrupt it, basically negating the data.

So what's happening is so silly it makes me angry. Unlike a lot of BOINCers, I turn my computer off from time to time, generally when I'm away for awhile. Now windows during a shutdown always acts the same way; it tries to close down each program and gets confused when something's preventing it from turning off. One such thing is a program such as microsoft word or even notepad asking "Do you want to save your work?". No problem with that, most users close out of the screen, save (or discard) and then try again. Unfortunately when BOINC is set in always run mode.... this point where windows is hung with the dialog box..... results in computational errors with the tasks that try to run. BOINC will keep trying to work on them, and when it can't... will throw up it's hands and give up completely on the workunit. What's especially annoying is that this occurs within about 1 or 2 minutes... without much time for the user to react and fix the problem.

Taking a look at my host page: http://climateapps2.oerc.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/results.php?hostid=1112451 You can see the 3 climateprediction.net tasks from February 24 that are showing ERROR WHILE COMPUTING. These are all because of the windows shutdown situation mentioned above. Each task had approximately 17-20 hours processed already. Gone. all gone.
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Les Bayliss
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Message 43877 - Posted: 26 Feb 2012, 3:08:21 UTC - in response to Message 43876.  

For years we've been telling people: "Always Exit from BOINC before shutting down Windows, or before the computer is allowed to reboot after Windows updates."
But do people listen? NO!!!

We've also been telling people to make regular backups, so that the models can be recovered after an accident such as this.
Again, there are people who don't listen, or say that it's up to the project to make backups.


Backups: Here
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Profile Dave Jackson
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Message 43878 - Posted: 26 Feb 2012, 8:06:38 UTC - in response to Message 43877.  

Interestingly, since I started doing a weekly backup of the BOINC data directory I haven't had a model crash on me. I try and remember to suspend models and exiting before shutting down/hibernating but I guess I forget often enough that sooner or later I will crash a model again - probably in a week when I have forgotten to back up for some reason.
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Questions and Answers : Windows : sigh... 20+ hours of work thrown out at shutdown

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