Tips

Hardware freaks trying to make some sense out of a bunch of numbers

This is the page to help you squeeze out more work units per day. This is basically a compilation of alot of Tips and Tricks i have seen on webpages, newsgroups and message boards. Some of these tips may have no improvement at all. Some of these I havent personally tried and I am just passing these along. If you think that some tip or trick is simply bogus or dangerous to your system please let me know. If you have any tips that you think may be useful please send them to me! -zAmboni

First Off:
I highly urge you to take a look at former resident #1 Team Lamb Chop member Panders' most excellent article on SETI@Home client optimization. You can find the article here. I am sure some of his tips are echoed here, but he goes more indepth into alot of stuff I have no idea what he is talking about :-).

Windows 9x Tips:

Keep SETI v 2.0 GUI Running After Logout:
This tip comes from Daryle Tilroe...........

While I have not solved the icon problem yet I have found a way to keep seti running even after a logout in win9x (without using it as a screen saver which was my previous fix to get it restarted).  Basically I was certain that somewhere out there someone must have written a wrapper that used the RegisterServiceProcess call to launch anything as a service not killable by a logout.  After much searching I have finally found it (I suppose I could have written it but I always like the challenge of proving my theory that everything is on the web if you only look hard enough).  Anyhow without further ado:

http://home.sprintmail.com/~byrnsm/srvchost.zip

With this copied to the windows system directory and the following .reg:

--------

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"seticlient"="C:\\windows\\system\\srvchost.exe C:\\progra~1\\seti@h~1\\seti@h~1.exe -min"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices]
"seticlient"="C:\\windows\\system\\srvchost.exe C:\\progra~1\\seti@h~1\\seti@h~1.exe -min"

--------

you really have a robust seti on win9x not stopped by a simple logout.  As
an added "feature" it does not show up on the task list, this can be a pain
if you really need to kill it.

GUI Client: If you first stumbled across the SETI@Home project and downloaded a client, most likely you first downloaded the Windows GUI client (setiathome_win_1_06.exe). The problem with this client, is that in its "natural" state it is very slow. This client is meant to be run as a screensaver, and while it is in screensaver mode it uses CPU intensive graphics which slows down the entire client speed. If at all possible I would recommend using the text only client (i386-winnt-cmdline.exe) instead. I will talk about this client alittle bit later.

If for some reason you dont want to download the text only client or if you run Win95 (which the text client doesnt natively run in) there are a couple of things that you can do to optimize your client performance. First off: In the client preferences, set the screen saver to go blank at 0 minutes. This will get rid of your CPU wasting cycles trying to draw all those pretty (and useless) colors on the screen...we want speed baby! Also in the preferences screen set the client to Data analysis always runs. This means that the client will crank on work units all of the time instead of waiting for the screensaver to kick in.

Text Client: If you run Win98 then you can run the command line text client (i386-winnt-cmdline.exe). This client was originally ment to run on NT but it works quite well on Win98. The big advantage of this client is that it runs quite a bit faster than the GUI client. The command line client will take advantage of Dial Up Networking if you have it set to automatically dial up to the internet. When a WU is completed it will call for DUN to dialup and attempt to send the results and d/l a new WU. But, there are two problems which you may run into, the first problem is that if there are problems with the SETI@Home servers, the connection my timeout and then the command line client quits. The second problem is that some (including me) may not be able to connect to the internet automactically. To get around this (or if you are going to be away from your computer for a couple of days, you can do alittle bit of magic while using a .bat file. On my system i have a set of different folders in my root directory and have created a batch file to sequentially process several work units. This is an example of a batch file (you may need to modify this to fit your setup):

seti.exe -stop_after_process
if errorlevel -1073741510 goto stop
cd..
cd seti2
seti.exe -stop_after_process
if errorlevel -1073741510 goto stop
cd..
cd seti3
seti.exe -stop_after_process
if errorlevel -1073741510 goto stop
cd..
cd seti4
seti.exe -stop_after_process
if errorlevel -1073741510 goto stop
:stop

I placed copies of the text client (renamed seti.exe) into four seperate folders (seti, seti2, seti3, seti4) in my C:/ directory. I first connected to the internet and individually ran the seti.exe file to setup and download a work unit (i quit the program right after the download of a WU). When the batch file is run, it will process the work unit, and when the work unit is finished it will switch folders and then start on the next work unit. You could do even more folders and work units this way. But beware, if you have a work unit sitting around for more than 2 weeks SETI@Home thinks you have given up and may not actually credit you with the work unit when you upload the results.

Sometimes the SETI servers are alright and you still have a problem connecting to their servers, It may take 2-3 attempts to connect to their server before it actually sends results and d/l's a new work unit. When an attempt to connect to the server fails usually the command line client quits, but to get around this you may just want to create a batch file which loops, when the server connect fails, it restarts the client and attempts to connect again. The only problem with this is that it will loop forever if there is a problem with the SETI servers. To get out of this just do a ctrl-c or just quit the command window.

There are other interesting things you can do with scripting and batch files, I will refer you to Panders' article for more information there.

Another interesting tip i found....(I am currently checking it out now to see if it improves anything) is to modify the command line window properties. This tip involves the creation of a shortcut to the text client. And then you should do the following:

From the shortcut right click and select properties.
.....Click properties,
.....Click tab memory.
..........UNcheck protected.
..........UNcheck uses HMA
..........Set expanded EMS memory to NONE.
..........Set extended XMS to 16384
.....Click tab Screen
..........UNncheck Dynamic memory allocation
.....Click tab Misc
..........UNcheck Allow screen saver
..........UNcheck always suspend
..........Move idle sensitivity to far left (low)
Click apply

I should know soon if this helps out any.....or if it is kind of a useless waste of time! :)

Tips i have ran across which may totally be bogus:

1) "There's a RAM Disk program for Win9x called simply Ramdisk 98. It can be set to automatically load an image on startup and save an image on shutdown. Claims of 20% improvement in SETI@home performance are quoted, although only a few % at most have been realised by most people. Knowing how much some PC's crash rather than being shut down, I recommend that you make a backup copy of the RAM Disk every hour or so." I am sort of wary about this one, I tried it out....but everything was confusing. I had problems saving the RAMdisk image, and couldnt get it to restart using the image that i had saved.......so beware! I believe the thinking behind this is that every time the client processes alittle bit of data it saves the progress in the state.txt file. The theory is that if you run it on a RAMdisk, then it wont have to write to the HD only to ram giving a slight speed increase, but because of the number of writes to disk overall it would give an improvement......but like i said......beware!

2) There is also a program out there called TaskInfo98. With this program, you can use TaskInfo98 to change the priority of any process that is running on your computer. In its normal state the text client runs at "idle" priority, meaning that it doesnt interfere much with stuff you are running, and only uses the CPU when it is idle. To use task info:

Right-click on the Taskbar and click on Task Manager.
Click on the Processes tab and find the SETI@Home process.
Right-click on the SETI@Home process name and pick Set Priority.
Set the task priority to;
Low, if you want to run it in the background but its screwing up your work.
High, if you want to just run SETI@home
then click OK

Word of warning! If you set the prority to "High" dont expect to do anything else on your computer, because the client will be taking up all CPU cycles and may cause a serious lockup!

I dont know any solid claims of increased performance, but i think any increase would be small....

3) I believe that this is only for Win95, but may work for Win98. This involves disk cache settings....I dont think that there would be any improvement with Win98 since Win98 supposedly handles caching automatically and pretty well.

Change the following in your system.ini:
[vcache]
minfilecache=4096
maxfilecache=6144
chunksize=512
(People with more than 64MB of RAM should use 6144 for the minimum, and 16384 for the max.)

Use at your own risk.

NT and Linux Tips:

I really dont know anything about either NT or Linux. I suggest *again* that you check out Panders's article for further information!

Mac Tips:

Yea we all know, we dont use any steenking Macs!
Or do we?
Well anyways....I'm not going to post any Mac Tips here, but will give a couple of links to some places that do have them.....and here they are:

Tips at SETI Station, o'grady's powerpage, and MacAddict

Well that is just about it for now.....
If there is anything else interesting that i find i will post it here
Again drop me a line if you disagree with anything here or know of anything else that I didnt cover!
-zAmboni

-Lamb Chop Home