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jasong
08-10-2005, 05:00 PM
Below is a message I sent in another thread, I believe it's important enough to get a new thread with a better title:

DCers love DCing. And some of them are willing to put in significant cash to get high scores in a project. But they need to know where to focus. Especially in a project where the optimal specifications for getting points could change. Could that be this project? Possibly. A benchmark utility and a thread that discusses what client.exe "likes" when it comes to different scenarios.

I made a couple requests, Priority management and a benchmark utility.

The first one might not be wanted by a lot of people, but might attract people who are anal about maxing out their cpus.

The second was a benchmark utility, something I'm interested in, but don't know how difficult it would be to implement. I know some people would absolutely LOVE IT if you could give them the ability to tweak their machines to optimize their output. I don't know how yours might work, if you had one, but I'm guessing someone there is familiar with things like how often RAM might be accessed, how much L1 and L2 cache is utilized(or useful) and things like that. Would it be possible to determine, within each individual process of the computer, the amount of clock cycles between RAM accesses and whether or not there's any cpu time spent waiting for RAM to respond? If you could give some statistics, I'm sure someone could come up with either a formula or a randomizer program to simulate waiting times. That would be fabulous.

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Edit: I know I'm a complainer, so, to make up for it, I'm coming back to Eon. Hopefully, though, I'll have a worthy program to deal with the downtime.

graeme
08-10-2005, 08:39 PM
Yes, the benchmark program is definitely on my list. At first I was thinking about how to do this dynamically for the running server, but this will just be too complicated. I will make some benchmark binaries, before the end of Aug. Bug me if I forget.

I'm not sure about the priority setting. On unix, linux, and osx, the priority can be set with the nice command. For windows, Omer and I spent a bit of time setting the default priority so that eon would not slow down system processes. The task manager can be used to further reduce this setting, although I'm not sure it can increase it. Can you tell me why you want to change the default priority? Does this have to do with running the eon client along side of another program. As the client is currently set, it will still make full use of the unused CPU. If eon is the primary process, it will not run faster with a higher priority.

jasong
08-11-2005, 05:44 PM
With the way the EoN client and server are running at the moment, I've gotten about 30 seconds per hour of downtime for the last 24 hours, so I'm a happy camper at the moment.

What I'm mainly concerned about is when the downtime averages to more than 2-3 hours for any 24 hour period.

I've decided yours is a very worthy project. Keep me informed of possible problems, and I'll stick with you.

AMDave
08-14-2005, 05:55 AM
jasong

have you tried running a second eOn client from another directory to pick up the remaining cycles ?

jasong
08-14-2005, 04:06 PM
Originally posted by AMDave
jasong

have you tried running a second eOn client from another directory to pick up the remaining cycles ? I'm not real confident in my ability to do that, but if someone posts some advice and possible pitfalls I might try it.

AMDave
08-15-2005, 12:47 AM
standard practice.

ref: "Apr 13,2005: Running Multiple Copies "
at: http://eon.cm.utexas.edu/index.php

You may occasionally see the two clients processing the same HSize value at the same time, but if you have a closer look just above at the "Image Done" parameters, you should see that they are different.

have a go.

Also, you have stated some interest in what is going on in the background. Try, TaskInfo from Iarsn:
http://www.iarsn.com/taskinfo.html
It can show you enough info to poke a stick at.
(thanks for the tip vaughan)

graeme
08-19-2005, 01:03 AM
I wrote a little stand alone benchmark program today.
I'll post it on the eon webpage tomorrow.

jasong
08-19-2005, 09:10 AM
:notworthy

jasong
08-19-2005, 05:35 PM
Originally posted by graeme
I wrote a little stand alone benchmark program today.
I'll post it on the eon webpage tomorrow.
Not that I'm one to quibble, except I am.

When you said you would post it "tomorrow," the time was listed as 3 minutes after midnight where I am. So...what time was it there, and if it was after midnight how technical was your reference to "doing it tomorrow?"

I'm still waiting for my CPAP machine(to help me sleep), so I may be suffering from sleep deprivation. I do feel strange and, yes, I am bored to death.

graeme
08-19-2005, 05:41 PM
Yeah, it was after midnight here as well, so I guess I could wait til tomorrow ...

No, but I still have 7.5 hours by my time. I'm sorting out the windows version.
If you are on linux/osx, I could post it now.

PY 222
08-19-2005, 05:46 PM
You can post the Linux version and I'll test it out for you. :thumbs:

graeme
08-19-2005, 06:36 PM
Cool, that would be great. I've put the linux benchmark on the eon download page.
I'll have the other operating systems there tonight. I would also like to put a few
other benchmarks there as well. This one, which is the current system, is very
fast. We typically have been running slower workunits.

PY 222
08-19-2005, 07:08 PM
graeme, question regarding the benchmarking utility.

Will it send the result back to the server?

Does running the benchmark utility on the same machine several times create several different HSizes?

graeme
08-19-2005, 11:22 PM
The benchmark utility is a stand-alone binary. It does not use the network in
any way. Basically, it is a server and client in one application. The server starts,
generates a work unit, passes the information to the client, and executes it with
a timer. The same work unit will be generated each time it runs.

graeme
08-20-2005, 02:33 AM
The windows benchmark is also available -- only a couple of hours late.

jasong
08-23-2005, 08:10 PM
Just as a heads-up:Most of the time I spend on these forums(Free-DC) is because my social life has been ruined by my horrible sleeping patterns.

Mind you, I have no intention of neglecting my DC hobby, but I'm hoping that when I get my CPAP machine(sleep aid device) I'll be able to get a job and have more of a normal life.

The reason I'm saying this is because, in addition to the above, I want to be able to max out my cpu without having to worry about. So when you get that Priority settings problem worked out, I'll be eager to place an Eon client on each of my two machines.

Right now, I'm simply running a more predictable client.