Active clients counters fluctuate within the hour

[ali.saif]

My understanding of Active clients within 7 days and 50 days counters is that if a client gets active, it remains counted until it isn't active for 7 consecutive days and 50 consecutive days respective to the counters. Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.

It seems though that my client counters keep going to up to a maximum (always lower than the actual number of clients for some reason) and then fluctuating below it. Shouldn't it stay solid if no client drops within 7 days?

[Joe_H]

Active clients are defined as ones that have turned in work during that period. Have all of yours done so in the previous 7 days?

[ali.saif]

Active clients are defined as ones that have turned in work during that period. Have all of yours done so in the previous 7 days?

yes they all have as i am monitering their progress.

[Joe_H]

Unless someone else comes up with another reason, the only other cause I know of for the count to not match is cloned installs of the folding client to multiple computers. I have seen this with one of my team members. He is an IT person at an elementary school and has permission to run the client in the background on a number of machines at the school during the day. The OS and software installations are cloned from a server, so all of his folding clients have the same User ID encoded in the client directory. So he has multiple computers folding under his username, but only one active client is listed under it on the official stats.

[P5-133XL]

Unless someone else comes up with another reason, the only other cause I know of for the count to not match is cloned installs of the folding client to multiple computers. I have seen this with one of my team members. He is an IT person at an elementary school and has permission to run the client in the background on a number of machines at the school during the day. The OS and software installations are cloned from a server, so all of his folding clients have the same User ID encoded in the client directory. So he has multiple computers folding under his username, but only one active client is listed under it on the official stats.

If the clients are all folding with the same machineID, then they are all folding the same WU (or an older one that has already been returned) and only the first one that returns it will have any value both scientifically and points-wise. What a waste.

[Jesse_V]

Unless someone else comes up with another reason, the only other cause I know of for the count to not match is cloned installs of the folding client to multiple computers. I have seen this with one of my team members. He is an IT person at an elementary school and has permission to run the client in the background on a number of machines at the school during the day. The OS and software installations are cloned from a server, so all of his folding clients have the same User ID encoded in the client directory. So he has multiple computers folding under his username, but only one active client is listed under it on the official stats.

If there's only one active client listed on his username's stats, then your teammate has kind of got a problem. You can have the same Machine ID on separate computers and things are fine, but you can't just copy/paste the directory. You have to delete a couple of the folders. The install guides explain. If he's only getting a single machine's worth of PPD, he's got a serious problem and should look into it, and soon.

[Joe_H]

Same User ID which is assigned by F@H first time a new client install connects to Stanford, not Machine ID. He has no problem getting unique WU's, I assume he is setting the Machine ID to different values after startup of the newly cloned system. It is an older version (V5 PPC) of the client, separate Machine ID's were used to distinguish between multiple instances running on multi-CPU machines with their own local directory. So in effect each machine can be treated as a separate CPU. The processing time and deadlines are long for the available WU's, He has been getting more PPD than what would show for a small number of CPU's.

P.S. Have any older Intel Macs to donate, he has no budget for replacement.

[ali.saif]

Update: I waited till the WU were done and reinstalled the clients. It seems like everything is working ok now and I got the 5 client count correctly .. i'll repost here if the problem occurs again.

As for the machine ID, I'm using v7 and that doesn't have a machine ID on it. All clients are fresh installs.

[7im]

Machine IDs are assumed in V7. Slot 0 is ID 0, etc.

[ali.saif]

My apologies .. I have figured out the problem. I had been checking my stats over the PS3 client information tab. It seems that it caches the pages or something cause every time I check it, it gives me a different last updated time hence the fluctuations in in the active clients since I was checking while I was adding new clients and after I make sure they've submitted at least 2 work units. I think it's a caching bug as it doesn't always get the latest stats page when I press My statistics on the PS3. After monitoring on the computer, stats look fine. My apologies for the trouble and thank you all for your help

7im, do I need to have different slot IDs for clients on different machines?? I never really understood how the machine ID works before that's why I always created one client only. How do the machine IDs relate to slot IDs?

[bruce]

Each machine has a value assigned by Stanford for UserID (not UserName) which identifies that machine. Within each machine each client must be identified with a different MachineID. the client combines the UserID and the MachineID so that every client is uniquely identified globally.

[ali.saif]

Each machine has a value assigned by Stanford for UserID (not UserName) which identifies that machine. Within each machine each client must be identified with a different MachineID. the client combines the UserID and the MachineID so that every client is uniquely identified globally.

Thank you for the explanation bruce. How is the User ID (which identifies the physical machine to my understanding) is determined? Is it based on MAC addresses or something unique to that physical machine? and how do I know the User ID of the machine i'm running on v7?

[bruce]

I can't think of any reason why you would care what the value of your UserID is. You can't use it for anything. Stanford assigns a unique value to each machine. It's just an arbitrary node number within the massive distributed supercomputer that is FAH. When the Assignment Server talks to your machine and then later talks to it again, it only needs to know whether it's the same node or a different one. By adding the MachineID, now it can tell whether it's talking to the same client again or a different one.

The only thing you might do with it is copy it from one node to another. By duplicating the value on more than one machine you could screw up the assignment process, causing the same work to be sent to more than one of your machines thereby forcing your machines to duplicate some work. You don't get credit for duplicate work so it would most certainly reduce your points. In other words: don't mess with it.