"slots" folder 7GB and growing

Message boards : Questions and problems : "slots" folder 7GB and growing
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josh1980

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Joined: 24 Mar 11
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United States
Message 37278 - Posted: 24 Mar 2011, 20:00:15 UTC

I have an SR-2 rig (16 cores) running WCG and GPUGRID.net. I have setup my data directory to point to an ANS-9010 with 16GB of RAM. I chose this route because I dedicated the machine to crunching CEP2 work units which are very hard disk intensive. Using a ram drive I have negated the issue of wearing down a hard drive with 16 simultaneous threads of CEP2. In any case, I have noticed that my boinc\slots folder has grown to 7GB and now I cannot accept new WUs because I have less than the minimum free space available.

Is there any way I can delete this folder or shrink it? I can't seem to find any documentation explaining what the folder does or if I can cleanup the folder by simply deleting it. I know that there's 98,847 files(holy smokes!). Surely I don't actually need all of these files, do I? I did try compressing the files using Windows 7's built-in file compression, but I'm confident the folder will continue to grow until I am forced to do something more drastic. I used to have a 5 day queue, but now I can barely keep all cores busy because of disk space. I'd like to get back to 100% CPU usage if possible without having to delete the data directory and starting over.

Thanks.
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Claggy

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Joined: 23 Apr 07
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United Kingdom
Message 37279 - Posted: 24 Mar 2011, 20:52:49 UTC - in response to Message 37278.  
Last modified: 24 Mar 2011, 20:55:38 UTC

The slots folder holds your tasks in progress, finish those tasks and report them and the size will reduce, you may need to increase the space allowed by Boinc to allow that,
then try a different mix of projects across your cores, with some that aren't so disk intensive,

Claggy
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josh1980

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Message 37280 - Posted: 24 Mar 2011, 21:16:35 UTC - in response to Message 37279.  

Hmm. There must be something wrong with my setup then.

Unfortunately I can't increase the allowable size of the boinc folder since it's already at 95%. The drive is dedicated to crunching and there are no other files on the drive. It wouldn't matter even if I could set the size bigger because the issue is that since there is less than 2048MB free (a requirement of the CEP2 project) I get an error in BOINC that says no work units were downloaded since the total free space on the drive was less than 2048MB. GPUGRID doesn't have the same free space requirements and will continue to download and execute them without issues.

It's very odd that I now have zero new WUs to execute and I don't have enough space. I have also run a chkdsk to verify that there isn't a file system error.

If I have no tasks in queue and all tasks have been reported am I safe to delete the folder contents? I do have BOINC set up to report all results immediately. I wonder if this is somehow related to my problems. Ultimately I don't see any other way to resolve this issue except to find a way to clear out the unused files or delete all of the files in the slots folder.
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Profile Jord
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Message 37283 - Posted: 25 Mar 2011, 0:27:44 UTC - in response to Message 37280.  

As soon as BOINC has uploaded & reported the tasks from any of the slot directories, that directory's contents are deleted.
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josh1980

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Message 37284 - Posted: 25 Mar 2011, 2:51:53 UTC

Well, I guess I'll stop downloading new tasks and when all of the tasks are uploaded I'll empty the folder. I'm thinking the files have stuck around because of BSODs, loss of power, etc. I'll post back what happens(if anything) when I empty out the folder.
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josh1980

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Message 37289 - Posted: 25 Mar 2011, 22:43:04 UTC - in response to Message 37284.  

Well, I suspended all tasks and let the ones in queue finish. After all of the WUs in my queue were complete and uploaded the directory was virtually empty. So weird how big the folder got compared to past experience.

Thanks for the info for those that replied.
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Message boards : Questions and problems : "slots" folder 7GB and growing

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