953mb of space requested on Android clients

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Profile Yavanius
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Message 74122 - Posted: 17 Nov 2016, 5:14:43 UTC

Back in 2015, I reported an issue that Skynet POGS was causing BOINC to believe the project required 953mb on Android when even the desktop apps were nowhere near that large. So if your free space was below that expected threshold, BOINC refused to download work. If you free the space, you could get work and it would run happily even if the disk space dropped below that number although you wouldn't get any new work again.

They never got this issue solved and recently a team member reported the same issue on the ralph@home project so it's not exclusive to just one project...
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Juha
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Message 74174 - Posted: 17 Nov 2016, 20:30:21 UTC - in response to Message 74122.  

All tasks have their own disk space limit. The limit is supposed to be set so that all normal running tasks stay below the limit. If a task exceeds the limit BOINC will terminate the task on the assumption that there is something wrong with the task.

The server sends you only such tasks that have the disk space limit below the amount of disk space you have allowed BOINC to use. If the server has no such tasks available you get a message stating you don't have enough disk space available.

If some project has set the limit unnecessarily high you need to tell the project about that. There is nothing we can do about it.
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Profile Yavanius
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Message 74176 - Posted: 18 Nov 2016, 1:18:42 UTC - in response to Message 74174.  

It's ANDROID. No BOINC project requires almost one gigabyte of space on a mobile device.

What are the odds that two DIFFERENT projects both are giving the EXACT SAME ISSUE? That's the two I am AWARE of, it's quite possible it exists on others. I'm writing here because of that reason.
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Profile Jord
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Message 74177 - Posted: 18 Nov 2016, 1:48:00 UTC - in response to Message 74176.  

What is the device that this BOINC runs on?
How much storage space does it have? How much of that is free?
What are your settings for Max. used storage space, Min. spare storage in BOINC?

Can you otherwise post the event log with the whole detection routine plus the error that you get?
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Message 74196 - Posted: 18 Nov 2016, 17:38:48 UTC - in response to Message 74176.  

First of all, both Rosetta and Ralph talk about 800 MB available disk in their system requirements pages.

Second, 953 MB is not quite as random as it may seem. It's 1e9 bytes.

Third, a quick look at BOINC source tells that it uses 1e9 bytes as default in some places if the project has not supplied any other value. So it's still something you need to tell the project.
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Message 74202 - Posted: 18 Nov 2016, 21:56:21 UTC - in response to Message 74177.  
Last modified: 18 Nov 2016, 22:29:40 UTC

Client Messages

[b]Fri Nov 18 08:04:12 PST 2016|pogs|Message from server: fitsedwrapper needs 336.70MB more disk space.  You currently have 616.97 MB available and it needs 953.67 MB.[/b]
Fri Nov 18 08:04:12 PST 2016|pogs|No tasks sent
Fri Nov 18 08:04:12 PST 2016|pogs|Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Fri Nov 18 08:04:10 PST 2016|pogs|Requesting new tasks for CPU
Fri Nov 18 08:04:10 PST 2016|pogs|Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Fri Nov 18 07:37:50 PST 2016|pogs|Message from server: fitsedwrapper needs 336.77MB more disk space.  You currently have 616.91 MB available and it needs 953.67 MB.
Fri Nov 18 07:37:50 PST 2016|pogs|No tasks sent
Fri Nov 18 07:37:50 PST 2016|pogs|Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Fri Nov 18 07:37:48 PST 2016|pogs|Requesting new tasks for CPU
Fri Nov 18 07:37:48 PST 2016|pogs|Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Fri Nov 18 07:31:36 PST 2016|WUProp@Home|Scheduler request completed
Fri Nov 18 07:31:34 PST 2016|WUProp@Home|Not requesting tasks: non CPU intensive
Fri Nov 18 07:31:34 PST 2016|WUProp@Home|Sending scheduler request: Requested by project.
Fri Nov 18 07:26:07 PST 2016|pogs|Message from server: fitsedwrapper needs 336.77MB more disk space.  You currently have 616.91 MB available and it needs 953.67 MB.
Fri Nov 18 07:26:07 PST 2016|pogs|No tasks sent
Fri Nov 18 07:26:07 PST 2016|pogs|Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Fri Nov 18 07:26:05 PST 2016|pogs|Requesting new tasks for CPU
Fri Nov 18 07:26:05 PST 2016|pogs|Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Fri Nov 18 07:17:49 PST 2016|pogs|Message from server: fitsedwrapper needs 336.73MB more disk space.  You currently have 616.95 MB available and it needs 953.67 MB.
Fri Nov 18 07:17:49 PST 2016|pogs|No tasks sent
Fri Nov 18 07:17:49 PST 2016|pogs|Scheduler request completed: got 0 new tasks
Fri Nov 18 07:17:46 PST 2016|pogs|Requesting new tasks for CPU
Fri Nov 18 07:17:46 PST 2016|pogs|Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
Fri Nov 18 07:17:46 PST 2016||Resuming network activity
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||Suspending network activity - not connected to WiFi network
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||Suspending computation - on batteries
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||Not using a proxy
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||(to change preferences, visit a project web site or select Preferences in the Manager)
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||suspend work if non-BOINC CPU load exceeds 60%
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||don't use GPU while active
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||don't compute while active
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||max CPUs used: 2
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||max disk usage: 0.62GB
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||max memory usage when idle: 449.39MB
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||max memory usage when active: 449.39MB
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||Preferences:
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||Reading preferences override file
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016|pogs|URL http://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/; Computer ID 752377; resource share 126
Fri Nov 18 07:17:43 PST 2016||Config: report completed tasks immediately
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Profile Yavanius
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Message 74203 - Posted: 18 Nov 2016, 22:06:53 UTC - in response to Message 74196.  


Second, 953 MB is not quite as random as it may seem. It's 1e9 bytes.

Third, a quick look at BOINC source tells that it uses 1e9 bytes as default in some places if the project has not supplied any other value. So it's still something you need to tell the project.


AH hah, that's interesting. I was suspecting something in the code that was slapping that number on to it. I'll pass that on. In the meanwhile, maybe for future BOINC code there could be a check for the poor project developers that might overlook this that a more reasonable default for Android work. Android a relatively recent development in the BOINC ecosystem so a minor but obviously important detail got overlooked especially as most phones/tablets maxed out around 32gb when originally implemented. My wife's old phone had something like 2gb of storage (now you know how I discovered it!).

Why is the default set at 1 gb (essentially)? Is that something from early on? I realize systems are shipping with Terabyte drives these days, but not everyone has them. ;)

~Yavanius
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Message 74410 - Posted: 26 Nov 2016, 18:53:22 UTC - in response to Message 74203.  

Keep in mind that just because it's a default value doesn't mean that project admins can't have set that deliberately.

Admin may have set that limit because
- they don't know how much disk space is needed and 1e9 is a nice round number
- individual tasks have unpredictable disk space usage and 1e9 is hoped to have big enough margin
- the project really needs that much disk space and supports only high end devices

The limit was increased from 1e8 to 1e9 bytes in 2009 as part of "set the job params to reasonable values" with some other changes.

The defaults are only in the script interface for creating work, the more programmatic interface doesn't have defaults. I thought about asking for this to be reviewed but decided against it because I don't think it would really accomplish anything useful.

The problem is that project admins don't think what values they should use when submitting tasks. If the values were required to be included the defaults would be just moved to the scripts and forgotten there.
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Message boards : Android : 953mb of space requested on Android clients

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