I don't know if it's me or just the weather here, but the seti@home client 1.0 seems to run abnormally slow. My brother has a powerbook G3 266 w/ 64 megs of ram. I've only got 32 megs of ram in my rev c. My brother's computer seems to compute the packets of data at rate much faster than my iMac. My average completion time is something like 90 hours, which seems wrong. Has anyone else had a problem like this?

[TwinFeats]

I have two Rev B iMacs, they are averaging about 23.5 hours for a data packet. I have noticed that the analysis seems to go one of 2 ways: either it is a pretty linear run time and requires about 23.5 hours to complete (most common), or the first 0.27% takes about 40 hours and then the rest of the data takes just a few more to complete. Strange.

another strange thing. I was trying to get it to go a bit faster and I was inclined to set my bit depth down to thousands of colours as opposed to millions (which is what I usually run in, yeah 64 bit icons!) and it seemed to almost double in speed. This client is very strange, but I'm glad to be part of the faster of the client systems, go mac! keep up the good work guys, hopefully an iMac will find aliens!

My Rev. A iMac running beta 1.02 is doing about 15hrs for a single unit. I keep it windowshaded so I cannot see the graphics and the thing flys. My iMac 233 crushes my PIII 450 running Win95 which takes about 29hrs to complete a single unit

I'm running a 333 iMac. It takes about 18 hours to complete a unit.
The readme file suggests keeping the Mac systems in thousands instead of millions of colors for the V1.0 Seti. They claim a new release will fix the problem with slowness related to millions of colors.

------------------
Tom Butler

running the beta of 1.02 of the seti@home client, windowshaded, I am averaging about 20-24 hours a unit. (I can't do the calculations very well b/c the first few units that I submitted were @ about 50 hours) all is well in the wetsponge land, keep cranking out those units! macs rule!

over the night last night I did 500+ units on my 333mhz iMac. Seti@Home must have had a bug. I have been running 1.05B for over a week now. New Version 1.05 was released yesterday for all to download. I am running 10hrs per unit right now.

[Rjtz15]

I have an iMac rev. B with MacOS 8.6 and SETI@HOME 1.06 in thousands of colors mode. SETI takes 56 hrs for a packet of info to be completed, but in the client, it doesn't record my total number of packets or total computer time. Help!!

[email protected]

iMac DV/SE finishes the seti package in 15.5 hrs. Compare to my old rev.A iMac, which finish one in 23 hrs, the iMac DV/SE is a pure joy

[blizaine]

Sorry for this stupid question, but after reading this topic I have no idea what you guys are talking about, and I'm curious. Would someone mind giving me a brief explanation about what you are talking about? I know that @home is a cable modem provider, right? So what is this test you guys are doing.
Thanks.

[MAlan]

SETI@home is a project in distributed computing. SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Because of the vast amount of data the powerful radio telescope arrays gather for the SETI project and the lack of funding for the project for the proper computing horse power, SETI decided to develop a screensaver for both the mac and windows platform (and maybe linux and Solaris too) which, when connected to the internet, will download data. The when your working off line and your computer is resting or sleeping the data is crunched and then when finished the results are sent back to the SETI server.

There is so much sky out there to look at and at various depths too. It's hard to imagine just how much data has to be crunched but I imagine its in the 100's or even 1000's of Quads.

[keekeeree]

My iMac DV chomps up those data packets in about 11-12 hours. Which is just a bit speedier than my Performa 6400 which took around 80+ hours. I <strong>love</strong> my iMac

[MAlan]

I severely misspoke when I used the term quad. A quad is actually 2 bits. I thought a quad was another term for a petabyte which is 1000 terabytes...a terabyte being 1000 gigabytes. So I must correct what I said above. The sentence should read
"It's hard to imagine just how much data has to be crunched but I imagine its in the 100's or even 1000's of petabytes."

[shawnb]

My Rev B iMac crunches one chunk in about 18 hours. Tried it on my PII-350 at work and got an astonishing 50 hours! Speaks for itself, no?

[Aaron]

Wow guys, those times are much longer than they should be. My iMac DV crunches a seti@home unit in about 9 hours, sometimes a bit more or a bit less.

There are several ways to make your seti@home work faster. A good page to read is
http://www.flex.com/~daniel/SETI/

in the TIPS section.

Aaron

My DV SE takes about 14 hours/unit.

My P150 (NT Server) takes a lot longer, but the record for slowest SETI has to go to my P200 (NT Worksta) at work -- 90+ hrs/unit. I have no idea what's wrong with it.

------------------
Rick Koch, MCSE
My personal computer is a Macintosh.

[Aaron]

BTW, my PII 400 at work chrunches each unit in about 10 hours, optimized very much the way I have my iMac optimized.

Aaron

hi seti people,
rev a 233, os 8.1,average 18hours to complete, win-NT PII350 at work: 24-25 hours!
imagine the power: some machine does it in 3hours...(i hope they will optimised the code for the G4...it might go to few minutes...)
gap

[markhers]

There was a post somewhere, but i've yet to find it again.

I was running SETI 2.02 on my G3/266 and was chugging for some 20 hours per unit...which seemed really really way too high. So I read something that gave a ton of hints, and you should all do this:

If the Preferences of SETI@Home, enable the screensaver, set it to run after 1 minute (change this if it gets annoying), set it to go to black after 1 minute, and run it at 256 grays.

I went from 20 hours/unit to 12. And I don't even have a G4.

The boost of the screensaver over the application (which I don't know why) is tremendous.

The boost of going to black is that SETI@H doesn't take the time to draw, or figure out how to draw, the graphics is does when it works as an app.

The boost of going to 256 grays is that your graphics card won't even bother to figure out the color which should be displayed, it just does a grayscale of it all, reducing the amount of required time considerably.

Since the Beige G3 isn't even UMA, I'm positive you can all beat my results, and I would suggest you try these settings out.

And as always...JOIN TEAM MACNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/c..._form&id=62645

[keyser_soze]

I agree with markhers. I'm on rev A with 1.02 on 8.6. I set the screen saver to 20 minutes and go black to 1 hour(pretty colors help me go to sleep).
I have averaged about 16 hours per unit for the last 50 units since i did this. Also if u know you're going to leave your computer for a while set one of the corners to be a hot key, so it starts up the screen saver right away.
Btw, i think it was discovery channel, had a pretty good show on the seti@home project last night.

[wlonh]

for maximum performance of SETI@home, see my tips in this thread: http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/Forum2/HTML/000411.html

My Performa 5215CD does one every couple of days sometimes. I love my 75MHz 603!

(joke)

running client 2.03, on my rev c lime green 266 monster, 160 bucket full o megs o ram, sans virtual memory, os 8.6, i'm squeezing a unit out every 14 hours, my brother's g4, on the other hand, does one every 6 or so, that's crunching power for you!