Not A Happy Camper

[Grumpy]

Well, it has been a long 1st week under the new Client, and I must say this has been the worst release in my memory. Here at OCworkbench we have battle, like other Teams, to sort out the myriad of problems and complete disasters that this new Client has brought. it is estimated OCworkbench has lost over 1500 Generations of work in the first 5 days alone to irrecoverable errors, and keeping Members from tossing in the towel has been a full time effort. i shall quote from one unhappy camper :P

"I haven't had that error again, but I think it is on their end and they need to give it their utmost attention. I'm down to folding with one computer again and won't be firing up the others until they get it fixed; not worth the high electric bill to have hundreds of generations lost because I can't afford to babysit the program. Tell them just to undo the security feature they installed. The last one didn't check if they were in order or the such; probally why the server keeps getting overloaded...hmmmm. They don't seem to concerned until they lose all their folders. By the way, no need for competition whith this one because it does what it wants anyways; they've sucessfully killed any fun involved with folding. The only reason I'm still here is because it is for a good cause; and you can forward that to them. "

We have a good number who feel this way, and although things seems to be pretty good now, the damage done to cinfidence will take some time to be forgotten. Many believe the Beta was supposed to get rid of these problems before the general population got to Fold with the Client.

I feel as though I have spent the last week fighting forest fires . Time to go back and inflict a bit of pain on the computers that are Folding too slow

Lets hope for blue skies and fair winds from now on


One buggered Grumpy signing off

[OclockdECS]

Thanks Grumpy, I just feel that everything all of us have been trying to accomplish by recruitment they almost destroyed in one week. We all tend to be competition minded around here and they almost squashed that by everyone losing so many proteins. I can honestly say I don't care who has more proteins then me; and I really don't care if they cheat to get them as long as some of them are real. They're only decieving themselves. The fun was being able to set multiple goals and acheive them on a Team and personal level. I'm still clicking my heals and wishing I was in Kansas but still chugging along nonetheless. No further problems other then this makes 157 look fast.
If all goes fine I may throw one more back in line tonight.

[DB7654321]

Oh, calm down. I'm sure Howard is well aware of any issues you're having and is working on it. Complaining about all the misfortune you've encountered from a small bug in a peice of distributed computing software isn't going to get anything fixed faster. It's not the end of the world. Be patient.

[beefdart]

Quit yer bitchin

[bwkaz]

Was anyone here around at the first release of the Phase 1 client? I know I wasn't, but I'd say that it very likely had the same sorts of problems. Obviously not exactly the same ones, but I'm sure it wasn't bug-free at the first release. Nothing ever is.

I know it's a PITA waiting, but I'm sure that just like the Phase 1 client ended up being pretty much rock-solid, the Phase 2 client will do the same thing. Eventually.

Look at it in perspective. This is the first wide test of a completely new algorithm; of course there will be some bugs in it.

[tpdooley]

In the last year, we've run through quite a host of different problems/bugs and been given a number of wonderful enhancements.

If you don't think enough of the bugs were found by the Beta testers.. Lynch 'em! erm.. forget that.. Guess we could have used a bit more help with people that have a knack for making things break..

[Paratima]

Originally posted by tpdooley
Guess we could have used a bit more help with people that have a knack for making things break..

Yes, but we are all conditioned to set up / run our systems so that they WON'T break! So even the beta testers we had were handicapped, in a way.

And I've been around almost since the start and the problems we're having with Phase II are (1) not as serious, show-stopping, as in Phase I and (2) not as obvious. Under the circumstances, I think that Howard and Elena are doing quite well.

[OclockdECS]

A bug is something that affects a few and sporatic. A flaw is something that affects 1/3 of the people that use it. I'm sure that they'll get it right; eventually. My point being as such small, incremental changes are probally more in order. Lets take things in perspective; you're right. When you build a house you start at the ground with the foundation. Next comes the lumber for the floors and walls. Would you jump from the foundation to the roof? I'm just a over-complaining whiner what do I know? I just got involved to be an a**hole. If I'm not mistaken; and I know I'm not: they claimed they had more then enough beta testers when I personally emailed him to get involved, and then when I did I had problems that I sent error reports about. If you look back in the posts you will see there were others that had problems as well; but this is a small bug it was completely ready for the masses.Hmmmmmmm.

By the way, I'm not saying that they aren't doing a good job just that smaller incremental changes would've probally been better. The point I was trying to make is that was it totally necessary to incorporate the verifying of protein order at the start of this big under taking, couldn't it have been incorporated later through auto-update after the servers were converted and tested with the masses?

[Grumpy]

Hmmm, I did not think I wa bitchin or complaining, just passing on opinions. We Folders are a touchy bunch

Was all the aggro and lost structures worth it, just look at the RMS values after a short time. When you test with a small sample group, things tend to fall through the net, as Howard discovered.

Just maybe we will break the 3.00 barrier.

[RaginSteveK]

those of us who've been Seti ing, Genoming or Folding @ for several yrs have known some REAL nightmares..

at one point, I used to set alarm clocks for weird hours to just HAVE A SHOT at uploading my results with some of those projects...

with one of them, on a good day I spent 4 hrs per getting my stuff turned in-- and that was when things were working the way they were sposed to !!!!
[ I know-- pretty stupid.. too bad I didnt have much of a life ]

this project has been a DREAM BY COMPARISON...

[I lost 150+ generations on one machine..
- not lost.. chose to start over, missing a key file- probably my mistake ...
mothballed the others for a day or so, so as not to foul them up ...]

[Stardragon]

Hi all,

I understand your frustration and appreciate the patience you have had waiting for a fix.

Unfortunately, as we do not have hundreds of programmers at our disposal (unless you count the monkeys... ), it is taking us a while to get at the heart of the matter. It appears only select people are experiencing the bug, so I am not entirely surprised it was not caught during the beta testing.

I will be posting shortly in the bugs forum asking you for some runtime information related to the bugs.

And I'd like to say you've all been great with sending attempted fixes so far. Thanks!

[sheriar]

The DF team is surely doing their best to sort out the bugs as urgently as possible. But the number of bugs existing currently (as is apparent from the various posts here) - and the fact that I have had one major bug myself (last generation missing) which resulted in a loss of a lot of work - has prompted me to now use my PC for another distributed computing project (UD's cancer project) until I'm sure that the bugs have been sorted out! That's cause I don't want to waste my processor cycles as has already happened.

Hope the DF team can come up with fixes quickly, we don't want to lose folders permanently.

Thks

[devzero]

Its become a daily thing with me.

Check all the machines see which ones have blown up for some reason or another and restart them. Most of the time having to loose all the work its done and/or start it over from scratch.

I find machines that haven't been working properly for days or weeks unless I check them regularly.

All I want is to have a client that will run without constant attention.