In the next day or two Free-DC will be offline in one way or another while I do updates.

--Skillz

BoincTasks++ 0.9.5 — manage every BOINC client you run, from one window

If you crunch on more than a couple of machines, you know the drill: open BOINC Manager, connect to a host, look, disconnect, connect to the next one. BoincTasks++ shows all of them at once.

It's a native port of eFMer's BoincTasks — the Windows application many of us have used for years — rebuilt to run on Linux and Windows. Tasks, projects, transfers, messages, history and notices from every client are merged into one view, each row carrying the computer it came from. It follows the original closely on purpose: same menus, same views, same columns, so if you know BoincTasks you already know this.

It's free and open source (GPLv3), and it's developed against a farm of 41 clients.

Already a BoincTasks user? You're one click from trying it

New in 0.9.5: File → Import computers from BoincTasks. Point it at your existing computers.xml and every host comes across — name, group, address, port, password and the enabled tick. It won't overwrite anything already on your list, so importing twice is harmless. Tested against a 157-host list.

If you've spent years building up a host list, you don't have to rebuild it to have a look.

Also new in 0.9.5

• Time Left that means something. It used to add up every task's remaining time — a queue of 1162 hour-long tasks on a 32-thread host read 48 days. But the host runs 32 at a time, so it's through the queue in around 36 hours. Collapsed groups and the Projects tab now estimate against the machine's real capacity: cores, your "use at most N% of the processors" setting, the CPU throttle, and the cores that running GPU tasks hold.
• Large fleets don't freeze the window any more when you tick a checkbox or edit a computer.
• The Use column shows GPU work properly, and counts only tasks actually running.

Get it

boinctasks-pp.free-dc.org — downloads and install guides

• Linux — AppImage (no install) or .deb. Needs glibc 2.34+ and GTK 3, so Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, Fedora 36+, RHEL/Rocky/Alma 9+, openSUSE Leap 15.4+. x86-64 only for now — no ARM build yet, so a Pi can be monitored but can't run the app itself.
• Windows — 10 and 11, 64-bit. It isn't code signed yet, so SmartScreen will warn the first time: More info → Run anyway, or check the SHA256 on the download page.

Source and releases: github.com/lblanchardiii/boinctasks-pp

Tell me what's broken

It's 0.9.5 — feature complete against Classic apart from the Windows-specific parts, and still being shaken out. Bug reports and feature requests are genuinely wanted, especially from anyone running a large or unusual setup.

• Discord — questions, help getting set up, release announcements
• GitHub issues — anything that should be tracked to a fix

Full credit to Fred (eFMer) for BoincTasks itself — this is his design and his years of work; the port exists so Linux crunchers can have it too.

In Memory of Willy de Zutter

Willy de Zutter, the man behind BOINCstats and BAM!, passed away on Sunday, July 26th, after a long fight with cancer.

   

If you have been around BOINC for any length of time, you have used something Willy built. He launched BOINCstats in the early days of BOINC and kept it running for roughly two decades: parsing exports, tracking projects as they came and went, and giving crunchers a place to watch their numbers climb. He also built BAM!, the BOINC Account Manager, which is still how a lot of people attach and manage projects across an entire fleet of hosts. That was not a small piece of work, and he maintained it for years, mostly on his own time, mostly without a lot of thanks.

   

Free-DC and BOINCstats have been the two big stats sites for as long as most of us have been doing this. People sometimes framed it as a rivalry. It never really was. Running a stats site is a lot of unglamorous work: chasing broken exports, babysitting databases, answering the same questions over and over, and doing it every single day because people count on the numbers being there in the morning. Willy did that for twenty years. Anyone who has tried it knows what that costs.

   

Our condolences go out to Willy's family, and to everyone in the BOINCstats and BAM! community.

   

Twenty years of keeping the numbers running. Thanks, Willy.

— Skillz

Help Us Secure New Server Hardware for Free-DC

Hey everyone,

I've got an opportunity to make a big upgrade to how Free-DC runs, and I wanted to bring it to the community to see if anyone would like to chip in.

I'm looking at purchasing a Dell PowerEdge R740xd to replace our current web server. This is proper enterprise hardware, and it would consolidate everything onto one solid, reliable machine. Here's the build:

• Chassis: Dell PowerEdge R740xd (2U, 24-bay 2.5")
• CPU: 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6148 — 40 cores total
• Memory: 384 GB DDR4
• Storage: 24x 240GB SSD (~5.76 TB), plus a BOSS dual-M.2 card for the OS boot drives
• Networking: Dual 10GbE + dual 1GbE
• Management: iDRAC9 for full remote control
• Power: Redundant 750W Platinum PSUs

Total: $4,814.60

Why this matters

This isn't just a "bigger box" purchase — it actually saves money and makes the site more secure going forward:

It cuts our monthly costs. Right now I run two separate servers — one for development/testing and one for production. With a machine this capable, I can run both on a single physical server using a Proxmox/VM setup, with the dev and production environments fully isolated from each other. That eliminates roughly $45/month in hosting that we won't need anymore.

Better bot protection. The new server comes with a block of 5 IP addresses instead of the single IP we have now. If you've been following along, you know we fight a constant battle against bot traffic and scrapers hammering the sites. Having multiple IPs gives me a lot more flexibility to route, isolate, and filter that junk traffic — including building a proper challenge layer in front of the web server to weed out bots before they ever touch the site.

More headroom for the community. More cores, more RAM, and fast enterprise storage mean the stats site stays fast and responsive even as we keep adding features.

How you can help

If you'd like to help make this happen, donations of any size go a long way toward securing the hardware. As always, every cost and every donation is tracked transparently on the donation page so you can see exactly where the money goes.

https://free-dc.org/donations

And to be clear — there's no pressure at all. Free-DC keeps running regardless. But if you've gotten value out of the stats over the years and want to help push it forward, this is a great way to do it.

Thanks as always for being part of this community. It's the reason any of this is worth doing.

— Skillz

Scheduled Maintenance: Saturday Stats Pause

Heads up: stats processing will be paused starting around 0400 UTC Saturday morning while some planned database work is done.

During this window the site will be live and browsable, but stats will not update for roughly 10 hours. No new gathering, no rollovers, no refreshed numbers until processing resumes.

Processing will be back up well before the next calendar day, so the daily rollover stays on schedule and your yesterday / 2-days-ago / etc. numbers will remain correct. Nothing is lost, the site just sits still for a bit.

Thanks for your patience.

— Skillz

edit Maintenance done. Stats have restarted at 2100 UTC.

Hey everyone, just a quick rundown of what's been going on behind the scenes and what's coming up. It's been a busy stretch, and not entirely by choice, so here's the full picture.  

 

Axiom Project - Being Removed & Rebuilt

  If you've been watching your stats lately, you may have noticed something unusual with Axiom. The project admin recently slashed user credits down to roughly 1% of their previous values. That kind of drastic credit reset cascades through everything: milestones, first-to achievements, hall of fame entries. It creates a cleanup nightmare that would take an enormous amount of time to untangle on a record-by-record basis.   Rather than chasing down every affected milestone and first-to entry manually, the cleanest solution is to remove Axiom from the database entirely and let it rebuild itself organically from current data. It's not ideal, but it's the right call. Once the project is back in, everything will reflect the new reality from the ground up. We apologize for any temporary disruption this causes to your Axiom stats.  

 

Badge Fixes & New Badges

  Several badges are currently not displaying correctly, and that was actually what was being worked on right before the hardware situation hit (more on that below). A fix is in the works. Additionally, new sub-project badges from PrimeGrid and a few other projects are being added. More details on exactly which ones once they're pushed live.  

 

Login Session Fix

  The login system has a known issue right now. Sessions aren't persisting properly, which means you're being kicked back to the login screen far too frequently. This is on the fix list and will be addressed shortly. Sorry for the annoyance in the meantime.  

 

CC_Config Generator - Almost Live

  A BOINC cc_config generator has been built and is in the final stages before going public. The tool itself is done and just needs the links pushed to the main site so the community can start using and testing it. It's had some internal testing, but real-world use will almost certainly surface things to tweak, so consider it a public beta when it launches. Feedback will be very welcome.   Once that's stable, the next step is building a companion app_config generator for individual projects.  

 

Codex - Per-Project Wiki Pages Coming Soon

  The Codex system is very nearly ready to go. This is a per-project knowledge base, think wiki, FAQ, optimization tips, configuration guides, troubleshooting, and more, for every project tracked on Free-DC. It's been in development for a while and is close to being pushed out. Stay tuned.  

 

Chart & Graph Migration (Ongoing)

  If you've looked at the host detail pages recently, you've already seen the new charting system in action. The plan is to roll this out site-wide, but given how many places charts appear across the site it's being done incrementally, one file at a time, as time allows. More pages will be converted as we go.  

 

CPU Data - More Curators Needed

  The CPU catalog is growing, but there's still a lot of ground to cover and we need more curators to help populate the data. If you're interested in helping out, reach out on Discord. On a related note, GPU data is nearly ready to be pushed out as well, so that's something to look forward to.  

 

Why Everything Is Delayed - Water Cooling Leak

  Here's the not-so-fun part of the update. The main development workstation sprung a water cooling leak earlier this week. One of the EK fittings connected to the CPU block started dripping onto the GPU backplate. Fortunately it was caught before any damage occurred, but the system has been down since.   Out of caution, all the EK fittings in the loop are being replaced rather than just the one that failed. The new fittings were ordered from Titanrig, but shipping has been slower than expected and they won't arrive until Monday the 16th. To make matters worse, there's a work trip scheduled Monday through Thursday, which means the rig won't be going back together until Friday night at the earliest.   The goal is to get everything rebuilt over the following weekend and resume work on Free-DC in earnest. Thanks for your patience. This stuff was supposed to be done last week and the timing couldn't have been worse.  

  That's the full picture for now. As always, if you have questions or want to get involved, especially as a curator, jump into the Discord. More updates as things get pushed live.

— Skillz

Hey everyone! 👋

If you've been browsing host pages on Free-DC lately, you may have noticed we're building out something new — a CPU catalog that adds images, specs, and reference links to every processor in our database. The goal is to make host pages more informative and a lot nicer to look at.

The thing is... we've got over 45,000 unique CPU model strings in the database. That's a lot of hardware to catalog, and there's no way I can do it alone. That's where you come in.

What's a Curator?

A Curator is a volunteer role on Free-DC. It gives you access to add and edit CPU information in the catalog — things like:

• A clean, top-down image of the processor
• Links to official product pages (Intel Ark, AMD Product pages, etc.)
• Links to quality reviews and benchmarks

You don't need to be an expert. If you can Google a CPU and find a good image and a couple of links, you've got what it takes.

What You Should Know

• There's no rush. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Do one CPU or twenty — every entry helps.
• Not every CPU needs an entry. Some are engineering samples, OEM one-offs, or so old that info simply doesn't exist. If you can't find anything, just skip it and move on.
• Quality matters. We want clean-looking images where the CPU fills the frame (top-down shots work best) and links to reputable sources. The admin page has built-in quick lookup links to help you find what you need fast.
• You'll have guidance. Full guidelines, image standards, and tips are posted on Discord for curators.

How to Get Involved

Getting started is easy:

1. Join our Discord — All curator coordination, guides, and announcements happen there. It's where I'll be communicating with the curator team directly.
2. Let me know you're interested — Drop a message in Discord and I'll get you set up with the Curator role.
3. Start cataloging! — Once you're set up, you'll see an [Add/Edit CPU] link on host pages. Click it, fill in the details, and save. That's it.

We already have a couple of awesome volunteers getting things rolling, and the more hands we have, the better Free-DC looks for everyone. If you're a hardware enthusiast or just want to pitch in and help the community, we'd love to have you on board.

Thanks for being part of Free-DC! 🙏

On April 5th, 2025, Bok handed over the Free-DC servers to me (Skillz) to continue operating the site independently. This marked the beginning of a new chapter for Free-DC, and I want to take a moment to recognize the incredible foundation that was built before I ever got involved.

A huge thank you to Bok for hosting Free-DC at his home for over 20 years. Think about that — two decades of keeping servers running, maintaining uptime, paying for electricity and bandwidth, and making sure the distributed computing community always had a place to track their contributions. Bok, along with Gopher and AMDave, built something truly special. The code, the infrastructure, the community — none of what exists today would be possible without their dedication. Thank you.

Now, here's what's been happening since April.

Getting Things Running (April – August 2025)

When I received the servers, the first priority was simply getting the site operational again. The codebase needed updates to work with modern PHP, scripts needed path corrections for the new environment, and the database processing pipeline had to be verified end to end. It was a lot of detective work — tracing how gatherstats, boinc_parse, and rollover scripts all fit together across two databases that alternate between serving web traffic and processing updates.

During this time I hosted everything from my home, which worked but wasn't ideal for a site serving millions of page views. Uptime depended on my home internet connection and power staying stable.

New Hardware and Datacenter Migration (November 2025)

I invested in new enterprise-grade hardware, including multiple 1.92TB NVMe U.2 drives spread across dedicated database volumes, giving each major database its own high-speed storage. The database server was packed up, shipped overnight to a professional datacenter, racked, and brought online remotely — all in under 24 hours. The site now benefits from datacenter-grade power, cooling, connectivity, and uptime that simply wasn't possible from a home setup.

Fixing and Optimizing Stats Processing

A significant amount of work went into the stats processing pipeline. Some highlights:

• Diagnosed and resolved severe performance degradation in the daily rollover process. What had ballooned to 7+ hours was traced back to MyISAM table fragmentation and brought back down to approximately 1 to 1.5 hours. Automated optimization now runs every three days to prevent this from recurring.
• Fixed numerous project-specific parsing issues — UTF-8 encoding problems from upstream BOINC servers, corrupted data recovery, duplicate milestone cleanup, and issues with individual project imports.
• Resolved PHP memory exhaustion issues on large dataset pages like Folding@Home's 2+ million user listings.
• Got the "New Apps" stats working again after directory structure changes broke the processing scripts.
• Updated the codebase for PHP 7.3 compatibility across the board.

New Features Added

Beyond keeping the lights on, I've been building new things to make the site more useful:

• User Authentication System — A brand new standalone login and registration system, replacing the old forum-based authentication. Secure PHP sessions with bcrypt password hashing and hCaptcha spam protection.
• Live Chat — A chat page integrated with our Discord server, so messages flow both ways. Logged-in users get their username automatically and skip the captcha.
• News System — You're reading it! A dedicated news page at free-dc.org with an admin panel for publishing updates to the community.
• News Ticker — A scrolling ticker on the stats site showing announcements, upcoming events, and community callouts.
• Project Status Monitoring — Real-time Grafana dashboards embedded directly into project pages showing task throughput, server health, work unit status, and historical trends. Data is collected every minute from each project's server status feed.
• CPU Catalog — A community-driven database of CPU images and specifications that appear on host pages. Includes a curator role system so trusted community members can contribute without needing full admin access.
• About Us and Privacy Policy Pages — Proper informational pages explaining what Free-DC is, our history, and how we handle user data.
• Updated Site Pages — Refreshed the About page with current information, added proper navigation, and ensured visual consistency across the site.

Infrastructure Improvements

Behind the scenes, the infrastructure has been significantly hardened:

• Comprehensive backup systems on dedicated NVMe storage.
• Automated table optimization to prevent performance degradation.
• Server monitoring and alerting through Grafana and Netdata.
• CSF firewall and ModSecurity for security hardening.
• Let's Encrypt SSL certificates across all subdomains.
• Dual-database architecture maintained and documented for continuity.

What's Coming Next

There's still a lot I want to do. Here's what's on the horizon:

• Systems Status Page — A public-facing dashboard at status.free-dc.org showing database health, processing status, disk usage, and overall system state so the community always knows what's going on.
• Chart Migration — Moving from ChartDirector to Apache ECharts for open-source, interactive charts that work better on modern browsers.
• Enhanced Event Integration — The news ticker will eventually pull from a database with countdown timers for BOINCGames sprints, BOINC community events and project milestones.
• Banner System — Community event advertisements in the header area to help promote BOINC events such as SETI.Germany's Pentathlon and other participating events within' the DC Community.
• Donation Transparency — A detailed page showing all incoming donations and outgoing expenses so everyone can see exactly where the money goes.
• Continued Optimization — Always looking for ways to make the site faster, more reliable, and more useful.

This has been an incredible amount of work, and I'm proud of how far things have come in less than a year. But Free-DC has always been a community effort, and it still is. If you want to help out — whether it's curating CPUs, reporting bugs, suggesting features, or just spreading the word — come find us on Discord.

Here's to the next 20 years.

— Skillz

This is a test post to check that everything is working as intended.

Some links do not work. They're just place holders. Will get to them soon.

The formatting still isn't perfect. It will be updated/tweaked over time to match the stats site more closely.

-Skillz