[OoklaTheMok]

Well, the team total should pass up my individual total before too long. I'm doing less than 50 WU/day now.

[pdjr]

50 WU a day? The tern eager beaver comes to mind.

[This message has been edited by pdjr (edited 04-27-2000).]

[tadd]

Team MacNN is processing 646 units/week as of April 27.
Last week I reported that Houston and Meko had disappeared. Meko came back! Great.
Welcome capparis, mkbhatia, Hobbit_Boy! Our total =53 members. disclaimer: as always, this data is hand manipulated and could have little or no correlation with reality.
The following is the number of units each contributer has crunched in the past week, or if they just joined, since they joined.

111 chris
41 pdjr
41 xYankee
36 Russel Mazzel
34 FireWire
33 ironknee
29 Tadd
23 blank
23 Donguido
23 kate
22 proux
19 Mulder and Scully
16 squareman@work
14 Buckaroo Banzai-1
14 japruss
12 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
11 siboett
10 John L. Becker
10 nycdewd
9 Joe
9 John Osborn
9 steve rosenberg
9 Yaw Anokwa
8 Al cacicedo
8 Benjamin Everson
8 blake
8 Mike Elness
7 blank
6 Thomas Richard
5 Dave McSherry
5 kaiser_soce
5 TRS
4 aeacus
4 nathan_ford
4 parisblue
4 Shayne
3 Etienne
3 tpw
1 Dave
1 mark
1 meko
1 Silverhawk
1 Thunder Dan
1 YWadiaG4


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[Todd Madson]

Interesting. I managed to conscript one of the machines at work to my cause. It's a Pentium III 550 mhz machine with 128 megs of ram and about 6.5 gigs of hard drive space. This Katmai based machines takes around 7:15-7:30 to do a single block. Of course, My G4 machine is now taking around 5:48 average to do a block. Not bad. The G4 proves it can hold its own rather nicely.

[tadd]

Todd, imagine how good the G4 would look if it's altivec unit was being used by the seti@home software.

------------------
Tadd Torborg

[Cipher13]

Anyone tried using SETI@Home from behind a firewall?
I have 20 iMacs and a couple B&W servers just waiting to be added to Team MacNN, but I can't get it to work - they're on an ISDN which is behind a firewall.
Any help would be appreciated...
TIA

Cipher13

[Todd Madson]

I would dearly love an altivec enabled client. What can you do? I've tried the RC5 client and it generates so many keys per second it's laughable - over 3 million keys per second as compared to a 550 mhz Pentium machine. As far as dealing with firewalls - hard. I have a single machine with a dialup ppp connection at work that I've been using for this purpose but the dialup goes away soon when we move and no more Seti @ Work!

[tadd]

re: Problem with firewall
My machines are all on a LAN with a NAT routing firewall that dials into a PPP ISP with a 56K phone modem. I haven't had any problems at all with seti@home except back before version 2.0. In that case the problem was that when the seti@home work unit was done the seti@home would try to access it's server and the telephone PPP connect wouldn't be up. So, it would stop wait for user intervention. In the morning all of my machines would be waiting. Now, I think it was version 2.0, seti@home tries over and over to get through and after the first try the telephone connection is made. I think my ISP times me out after 10 or so minutes of inactivity.

It may be that your firewall is specifically forbidding a connection of the type that seti@home uses. I imagine that it isn't http, pop, or ftp. You may have to beg the system administrator to work with you.

Wierd and probably unworkable ill-thought out alternative:
As I recall there was a script program that allowed a seti@home participant to download several work units at a time and then process them all before making contact with the server again. I wonder if you could download enough to keep your fleet of macs busy for a week, and then upload all of the results at once from a different facility?
------------------
Tadd Torborg

[This message has been edited by tadd (edited 04-30-2000).]

[Cipher13]

Very interesting about the script - any idea what it was called or where to get it? I have access to a T3 where I could download the data, move it around on a FireWire HD, and then have the iMacs analyse it and then send it back via the T3 later...
Unfortunately the firewall is totally out of my control - the Catholic Education Office runs it, and all Catholic schools in the state have ISDN's that converge on it, and so I have no access to its servers whatsoever...
Thanks for the replies!

Cipher13

[This message has been edited by Cipher13 (edited 05-01-2000).]

[wlonh]

here's yer huckleberry... Seti Unit Manager: http://212.86.34.76/SUM/Readme.html

Why do I show up as a blank on the team page?? I'm using SetiChecker, and I can locate my work units in the team listing, but my name doesn't show up. Any ideas??

[Todd Madson]

Their server was down for four hours earlier this evening and it appears that parts of it aren't quite back to the way they were before they did. They evidently replaced a SCSI RAID controller as it apparently was defective.

[Cipher13]

Thankyou, and I'll soon be on Team MacNN, providing everything goes according to plan :-)

Cipher13

[pdjr]

Originally posted by tonymac:
Why do I show up as a blank on the team page?? I'm using SetiChecker, and I can locate my work units in the team listing, but my name doesn't show up. Any ideas??

Have you visited the user account area and updated your information?

Thanks for your help. I found the option to let them display my name.

Thanks again!

Tony

I just joined up. I've been doing data units for quite awhile, letting my iMac (rev A) do its thing at home while I'm at school. I'm looking forward to working with you all. : )

[tadd]

It's been 10 days since my last report so I missed some processing that was done between apr 27 and apr 30.
THis report is for the week from apr 30 to may 06. Team MacNN processed 528 units. We have 55 members now having lost one of the blank members. Welcome to our new members: garretnelson, kristy, and tonymac!
Here are the members who processed units over the past week including the number of units processed:
80 chris
43 xYankee
42 FireWire
35 Russel Mazzel
28 pdjr
25 ironknee
20 Donguido
17 Mulder and Scully
17 proux
17 Tadd
14 japruss
14 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
14 kate
13 Thomas Richard
12 squareman@work
11 Dave McSherry
11 siboett
10 Buckaroo Banzai-1
8 Al cacicedo
8 John L. Becker
8 nycdewd
7 blake
7 Joe
7 Mike Elness
7 steve rosenberg
7 Thunder Dan
6 blank
5 Etienne
5 tpw
4 kaiser_soce
4 TRS
3 aeacus
3 Hobbit_Boy
3 John Osborn
3 meko
3 nathan_ford
3 Shayne
2 Benjamin Everson
1 Dave
1 YWadiaG4


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[zac4mac]

a few days ago, wlonh said "make no mistake about Speed Disk, it will not improve matters in the way of speed, period."....Not True at all. Especially notable if you are running a disk formatted to HFS+ and have tiny block sizes. Put all the parts of a file into a sequential, contiguous group instead of many scattered blocks and access time improves. Fragmented files take longer to access and thereby slow down performance any time the disk is accessed. The same principle applies to fragmented or non-optimized directories.... the less your machine has to hunt to get the info it needs, the snappier the response... I must be doing something right, as my average time on a G3-454 PM8500 is 6hrs 2mins after 255 units(No Cheats)

[wlonh]

you, my friend, are mistaken! search the forum for the truth!

look, it doesn't matter these days, Speed Disk is negligible in its effect... Macs and HD's are just too speedy in the first place these days and blocksize (HFS+) has zilch to do with it

this is pretty much a given, Speed Disk will only make a real difference on older and slower Macs OR if you are working with large AUDIO or VIDEO or PHOTOSHOP files as a matter of your livelihood

now, if you are talking about optimizing DIRECTORIES, that is totally different... if your directories are fragged that can slow you down... and though Speed Disk can be set to optimize directories these days, that is NOT what its main job has been, historically speaking. DiskWarrior is a DIRECTORY optimizer and works fast and well, i use it quite often, and it does not defrag the HD in the sense that Speed Disk does

search MacFixit forums, MacIntouch archives, MacNN forums... i have researched this and the answer is clear for me running a 466MHz G3 with IBM UW/SCSI's

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 05-06-2000).]

[brock76]

Wlonh also refers about reading the "Read Me" file. Well if the source of the FAQ's on Seti@home's web page are anything like the "Read Me", take it as light advice. They bought to light that increasing your RAM will not help performance.
http://www.setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/faq.html#q74

I hope the same techs don't answer these questions that also write the "Read Me" file.
I've dropped over 1 hour, from ~8 to <7hours/WU by adding another 64M on top of my original 64M.

Gotta know the sources. Besides...there, prolly just a bunch PC programmers at heart.



Brock
[email protected]

[wlonh]

ok ok ok, so everybody wants to be a critic today, huh?

well well, Brock, did you EVEN read that SETI info you posted the URL to? lol

"SETI@home uses about 16 MB of RAM while it's running. Beyond a certain point (typically 64MB, more if you run memory-itensive applications) more RAM won't make it run faster. "

sounds right to me! on yer bike mate!

furthermore, there is not one bit of info at the SETI site or at SETI Station that is not true or helpful as far as i have been able to ascertain

sources, indeed... if they were snakes, ya wouldn't see 'em and then they'd bite ya



[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 05-06-2000).]

[garrettnelson]

Hey, any ideas why my PowerMac 9500 w/G3/266 upgrade takes over twice as long to process units as my iMac DV/400?

[wlonh]

old Mac = slow bus speed, no cpu upgrade can change that

that fact coupled with the DV's greater clockspeed, BINGO, you have a factor of 2 (approx)

meaning the DV is about twice as fast

[garrettnelson]

thanks. Guess I'll just have to let it plod along....

[tadd]

Hmm.. I wonder about that answer. 66Mhz vs 100Mhz may seem like 2:1 speed difference but it is only 1.5:1 and bus speed isn't always the most important bottleneck. I suspect that with enough backside cache, with equal RAM, and with equal HD speed, you might bring the two closer together. Otherwise, a 100Mhz CPU on a 100Mhz bus would always be faster than a 1Ghz CPU on a 66Mhz bus. That just doesn't SOUND right.

------------------
Tadd Torborg

[This message has been edited by tadd (edited 05-07-2000).]

[wlonh]

well Tadd, note that one is 266 and the other is 400 MHz... some big difference there, like i said, and i bet that upgrade is NOT pumping 266 but likely a bit less... couple the two (lower bus speed and lower MHz) and whaddaya got?

ok, maybe not a factor of 2 but close enuff to it for gov't work!!

and everyone's mileage varies, n'est-ce pas?
so it is not hard to figure that an older/slower Mac would run SETI slower even if it may seem that it should not be that much slower

mileage varies. like MacOS 9.04 is virtually troublefree for many (like myself) and gets nothing but curses from others...

i guess i should have said that, all things considered, it is not unusual to see such a disparity between the two Macs in question in running SETI@home... and by all means read up on the tweaks for SETI@home, most if not all are posted here on the fora

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 05-07-2000).]

[Misha]

Have you tried bumping up the speed of the cache in the 266 upgrade? You may actually be able to run it at 1:1.

Simiarly you can bump the iMac DV's cache up to 200 MHz from 160 MHz, which helps a little.

[zac4mac]

wlonh says:"old Mac = slow bus speed, no cpu upgrade can change that "...Not

Garrett...
Some tips for your 9500:
1) If you have a ZIF G3 upgrade, check the carrier card bus switch settings. I have an XLR8 carrier in my 8500. Original bus speed- 40MHz. Current bus speed 56.8 MHz (making the G3-400 run @ 454, L2(1MB) @ 227
2) have at least 128MB RAM, Interleaved EDO if possible.
3) Consider a new G3 card, the 400 MHz ZIFs are really cheap now and you will be able to run a G4 in a ZIF later

------------------
A computer without a MicroSoft Operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.

[wlonh]

you are speaking of on-card bus speed of the cpu upgrade itself, that is different

and you ain't gonna get 66 or 100 outta that older Mac no way

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 05-07-2000).]

[zac4mac]

Yes, that bus speed IS dictated by the daughter card, but is not restricted to there only... it is also the speed the CPU communicates with RAM and the rest of the motherboard..ie "The Bus" ... It does not affect the speed of the PCI bus, that's 33MHz and it won't give you AGP either or change the speed of your 1 or 2 SCSI bus' transfer rates.
Nope I won't get 66 or 100 MHz, only 56.8 out of the bus, but that's a healthy jump from 40 MHz(very noticeable performance boost)

[Todd Madson]

One of the biggest tools that boosted my speed significantly without investing in a third party accelerator (oddly enough) was the software for a third party accelerator card. I have a G4/400 Sawtooth machine and was told to seek out a PowerLogix cache control software package. I was able to increase my backside cache speed from 199 mhz to 267.5 mhz and it shaved 15-20 minutes off of my best Seti @ Home block time. Now, I wouldn't recommend this unless you're in an air conditioned home since I have found that it has hung the machine when it is warm out (it was 87 degrees with high humidity the other day and with no central air the machine wasn't too happy about that). With central air turned on it was happy as a claim and just screaming along. Try it if you want. Shaving 15-20 minutes might not seem like much but over cumulative time it means I can sometimes do 6 blocks a day on that machine instead of 5. Then my other machines are just gravy on top. Try it!

[Todd Madson]

One other comment regarding adding ram. Sunday I was in at work making sure machines were working after a move. I checked out non-Sawtooth G4 Macintosh 350 mhz that had twice the ram memory of my machine. Set for the same screen resolution as my machine and the same exact monitor as my 400 mhz sawtooth I was stunned to see how much snappier and faster this machine felt. Screen redraws were faster and the whole machine just felt quicker. Now, I have 128 megs of ram but I'd love to run MacBench5 on this supposedly "slower" machine because when I got back to my machine at home I could feel the difference. Now, given that my own machine is running Seti @ Home all of the time my perceptions may be filtered. But I believe adding memory will give it a subtle but very feelable speed boost. It can only help the Seti @ Home process, not hinder it. Any commentary? Besides, more ram is good for other things anyway.

[wlonh]

undoubtedly, more RAM is a good thing... and i profess to having been confused by earlier post in this thread re: RAM and SETI

I have recommended many many times here in these fora that a good_starting_point for Macs these days is 128M, and i have 256M which serves my purposes well.

i doubt that going from 128 to 256 boosted my Mac's performance as regards SETI, i did not notice any boost to speak of... maybe it did, i am not much on taking time out to do a MacBench

also to clarify, i was under the impression for some very stupid reason that an earlier post was referring to RAM allocation and not RAM installation... i know this sounds kinda lame but i had just slipped a major cog there apparently... i do that sometimes when i approach sensory overload because of to much simultaneous input (i need pre-emptive multi-tasking i guess)

[brock76]

I hope you were talking about my installation of Ram earlier wlohn..... but anyways, im bringing my 290 w/u's to MacNN soon!!

[garrettnelson]

What is the best way to set the settings for this control panel, to optimize SETI performance?

[wlonh]

well, it looks like you have done so already...

L2 cache at half of CPU speed is ok, you can try to boost it but it may crash your Mac

not sure about the copy-back and write-through (i use a diff L2 accelerator) but it would seem you have it set right

motherboard cache, this setting wants to know which to use if you have a motherboard larger than the L2, use the larger... seems to be straightforward

and the memory timing, well, do you have 60ns
or 70ns memory installed? i'd guess that setting for 60ns would not make it slower if you indeed had 70ns memory installed, and if you do have 60ns then it should be optimal, and the only way i know to check is to look at the code numbers on the RAM chip itself to see what exact type of RAM it is

[garrettnelson]

Yeah, I tried at at CPU/1.0 and it was followed by a big crash. Is there anyway to find out the memory speed without opening the cover? It's painful trying to get it off

[wlonh]

not that i know of, the Apple System profiler won't tell you what's in your 9500 RAM-wise

ASP will tell in newer Macs whether it is 3-2-2 or 2-2-2 speed RAM

[garrettnelson]

Will GURU tell me?

http://www.newertech.com/software/guru/index.html

[wlonh]

nope, it only tells what kinda RAM (etc) you can use in any given Mac

[garrettnelson]

Oh well, guess I'll have to go look

What do I actually look for? Will it say the speed right on the memory chips?

[wlonh]

hold on there my friend... make sure you do know what the code is and where to look and the_whole_enchilada before you hafta break it open even though it is not that hard to do but hey who needs the downtime? i am sorry i don't have the info for you i think it is kinda a code that is not easily understood if i remember

research this further... and post another question i'd say, in the Older Systems and clones forum maybe

[This message has been edited by wlonh (edited 05-10-2000).]

[Todd Madson]

Do you know if using a Ramdisk would significantly decrease processing time on
an already fast system? I'd love to get more sub 5 hour result times and that's my
last thing to try at this point methinks. I'm trying everything I can think of (libmoto, cache speedup to 267.5 mhz from 199 mhz, lower color/resolution screen, screen blanking after one minute, virtual memory off, using peek-a-boo to kill all processes except seti@home, etc.) My last option I can think of is to use a ramdisk. Ideas other than that?

[wlonh]

click that little RAM disk button in the Memory control panel give it at least 1024k and restart

i assume you know how to do the rest

[Todd Madson]

I don't really see a drastic difference, but perhaps over time there will be.

[wlonh]

hey if it is only a few minutes faster, that is something

[brock76]

Hello, is there anyway that we can post a link to Team MacNN on the front page of MacNN.com? I noticed last week that when it was posted, we got a good turn out that signed up for the team. Matter of fact, that's how I found it as well. I do believe that there is more interest in this group from other fellow mac users.

Brock
[email protected]

[tadd]

This report is for the week between May 6 and May 13. This past week we processed 740 units.
We have 52 active participants now. The last report only had 40 active participants.
Welcome to Moof, bipto, YoEddy, Karey Gorkoff, Brock Dauterman, Jim, Bob K, SpottoUMT, and a new BLANK who have joined us and are already cranking out units. Welcome also to Andrew Miller, Dan, David Zikovitz, Drike, koko, lammons, Petri M...kel, Travis Dahlke, who have also joined us since my last report. I also note that our old BLANK changed it's name to jbiga. Good deal.
Here are a list of our active participants including the number of units they generated since my last report. Note that only units processed since my data-taking first noted the participant are counted.
76 chris
50 xYankee
47 Moof *new*
46 FireWire
44 Russel Mazzel
36 pdjr
31 ironknee
23 Donguido
26 bipto *new*
22 kate
22 Tadd
20 siboett
20 Thomas Richard
18 proux
16 japruss
15 Thunder Dan
15 tonymac
14 Buckaroo Banzai-1
14 Mulder and Scully
13 jeffreyloaf/G3-350
11 John L. Becker
11 squareman@work
10 mkbhatia
10 nycdewd
10 YoEddy *new*
9 garrettnelson
9 steve rosenberg
8 blake
8 Joe
8 Karey Gorkoff *new*
7 tpw
6 Al cacicedo
6 Dave McSherry
6 Etienne
6 kaiser_soce
5 jbiga (formerly blank)
5 Mike Elness
4 Brock Dauterman *new*
4 hamm
4 parisblue
3 Hobbit_Boy
3 John Osborn
3 meko
3 Shayne
3 TRS
2 Jim *new*
2 aeacus
2 nathan_ford
1 blank *new*
1 Bob K. *new*
1 kristy
1 SpottoUMT *new*


------------------
Tadd Torborg

[wlonh]

um, Tadd, we have 70+ members of Team MacNN at this moment... things are going to get crazy for you very soon as we get more... do whatever you want, but i'd hang up my guns if i were you

[zac4mac]

Hey wlonh...
y'all are really kicking some butt here. just checked your team stats and you're almost to 13k units... bravo! which group class are you coming up on? The MacCPU team is on the small business list and there is an acute paucity of Mac teams there. Seems like us(#24) and an Italian service bureau running G4's(#23). This SETI thing is turning into an amazing SUPER computer... almost 2 million users total, with more CPU's than that, since quite a few users run multiple machines on their login!

[This message has been edited by zac4mac (edited 05-14-2000).]