Hi,
It seems universe uses very little memory but extreme number of disk write activity.
This strikes me as very very inefficient.
Why don't you do this in memory and write the results to disk, instead of constantly having a large number of small data chunks being written to disk?

Hi,
It seems universe uses very little memory but extreme number of disk write activity.
This strikes me as very very inefficient.
Why don't you do this in memory and write the results to disk, instead of constantly having a large number of small data chunks being written to disk?

What version of BOINC Manager do you use?
This activity exists on v. 6.x

---

Krzysztof 'krzyszp' Piszczek

Member of Radioactive@Home team
My Patreon profile
Universe@Home on YT

I am using 7.4.42, the latest version, win 8.1 64 bit

Application saves 20 times checkpoint during execution and periodically saves some debug info (less than 20kb for each WU).

---

Krzysztof 'krzyszp' Piszczek

Member of Radioactive@Home team
My Patreon profile
Universe@Home on YT

It is saving files constantly, all the time, no break

These are the files, the 4 executables are constantly writing to.
The rate of saved data NEVER falls below 25000 Bytes/sec.

4x (universe-xray_sources_v2_3_windows_intelx86.exe)




Datei Write (B/s)
-0 23.491
-0 18.736
-0 18.512
-0 16.665
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\9 13.377
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\11 11.277
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\10 11.133
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\12 10.097
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\9\tmp5467.dat 696
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\10\tmp5467.dat 588
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\12\tmp5467.dat 521
G:\Boinc\ProgramData\BOINC\slots\11\tmp5467.dat 405

Hi,

There is indeed a file for temporary parameters storage. Although the usage of it is outdated, we had some more-urgent issues recently. We will do our best to fix this problem before the next release of code.

Thanks for reporting this! Such feedback is a great help for us.

---

Grzegorz Wiktorowicz
National Astronomical Observatories,
Chinese Academy of Sciences

Thanks for recognizing the issue.I only noticed it, because i am using a usb flash drive for boinc.However, this continuous writing is especially bad for flash or ssd drives, in the long run.

On Linux you can specualte this with iotop; every second disk activity:

Total DISK READ : 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE : 77.21 K/s
Actual DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Actual DISK WRITE: 77.21 K/s
TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO COMMAND
14019 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 7.72 K/s 0.00 % 1.85 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
19826 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 7.72 K/s 0.00 % 0.23 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
7665 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 7.72 K/s 0.00 % 0.14 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
11676 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 19.30 K/s 0.00 % 0.08 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
10008 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 15.44 K/s 0.00 % 0.06 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
18498 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 7.72 K/s 0.00 % 0.05 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
15378 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 7.72 K/s 0.00 % 0.03 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
14108 be/7 boinc 0.00 B/s 3.86 K/s 0.00 % 0.01 % ../../projects/universeathome.pl_universe/universe-xray_sources_v2_3_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu