How long has your system been running without a reset?

[Gary Edstrom]

I was just curious what the longest period of time that anyones GIMPS computer out there has been running without a reset. Here at home, I don't think that I have ever exceeded 30 days due to the fact that I either install a new piece of software that requires a reset, or upgrade Windows with one of the numerous patches which also require a reset. I have also had one power failure. I can imagine that some of you out there have a system sitting off in a corner that you never touch that has been running MUCH longer.

[QuintLeo]

I had a long (somewhat over 6 hour) power outage early this month.

At that point, several of my LINUX boxes had been running GIMPS 24/7 dedicated for 7-8 months - or since I first moved them over TO GIMPS from RC5/OGR.

My experience with GIMPS and distributed.net using LINUX dedicated cruncher boxes is that is the NORM - they keep running unless I get a hardware failure or a power outage too long for the UPSs to handle. It's one of the reasons I picked GIMPS as a change from RC5/OGR - the native client support for LINUX - and *one* of the reasons I geve up in disgust on United Devices - even though most of my boxes are NOT optimal for GIMPS work.

[dswanson]

I have a P-II box in the corner of a lab at work that's been up for well over a year. The project for which it was purchased is long since completed, and at 300 MHz it's a bit of a wimp, so no one has any interest in touching it.

[Daffy]

My PC at home needs to reboot at least once a week. It's mostly because I download anti-virus updates.

[Xyzzy]

Too bad we can't run mprime on it...

Our forum server:

[code:1]%uptime
12:38PM up 145 days, 16:56, 2 users, load averages: 0.36, 0.52, 0.45[/code:1]

[delta_t]

I think the longest continuously running client has been on one of my FreeBSD dual processor machines:

11:20AM up 146 days, 10:03, 1 user, load averages: 2.00, 2.00, 2.00

[sdbardwick]

Currently, my NT4SP6a server has been up for 124 days; would have been longer but for the building repairing the electrical system. The same system was up for 229 days prior to that.

[adpowers]

My Linux server was up over 170 days, but mprime wasn't running the whole time because mprime crashed for a few days when the primenet server went down. A power outage last Thursday destroyed my uptime.

[kwstone]

I'd been running my P4 under Win2k for several weeks without any apparent problems and knocked off my first exponent. I then started on a 10,000,000 digit baby and had been crunching that for some days, generally getting an iteration time of 0.105 or 0.106 when I wondered if Linux might be faster. So I rebooted into Linux and miserably failed to get mprime installed (boy am I dumb when it comes to Linux! ). But here's the interesting thing. When I rebooted into Win2k and ran Prime 95 again on the same exponent I was getting 0.097 to 0.098 iterations! And I had changed nothing in my setup.

Can a system reset actually improve times by freeing up some resources or other? or had I just frightened Windoze into trying harder in case I replaced it? :)

P.S. If anyone has the patience to explain to me how to get mprime working I'd appreciate it.

[Matthes]

Well there could always be a process stealing cycles. The taskmanager is a good place to look. Add a column for cputime - cpu-usage should be on by default. Look for process having a large cpu-time after the machine has been up for a day or so.

Now to the linux stuff.

I will use the console to do all this.

How far have you got? First of all you need to make a directory where you want mprime to run - something like md /usr/local/mprime - then put the tar.gz archive there. (mv mprime.xxx.tar.gz /usr/local/mprime) - next we get to unpacking the archive, use tar xvfz mprime.xxx.tar.gz to do that - after that start it up with ./mprime -m - you have about the same menu as in windows, just that it is text-based. Set everything up and you are done.

Hth, Matthes

[Reboot It]

Originally Posted by kwstone

Can a system reset actually improve times by freeing up some resources or other?

My experience says this is quite possible. I run under Windows 2000 and I have seen this happen plenty of times. It is not always necessary even to go as far as a reboot: commonly just stopping Prime95 (Test > Stop) and then immediately restarting it has this effect. You might have to do this several times to achieve the best iteration time!

Using Task Manager I have established that there is no consistent drain on CPU time from other processes causing this effect, and I think there was an earlier discussion somewhere that tentatively led to a conclusion that the way system RAM (i.e. not cache) was allocated led to this effect - if it was allocated more sequentially/contiguously or something like that the access was quicker. I am not personally sure if this is true (or even possible) but I have certainly demonstrated this phenomenon many times.

George: would you care to comment on this phenomenon?