So, there I was, watching my Rosetta@home crunching away and it's getting close to the time when it should be reporting the information back to the mothership. At about 15 minutes remaining to complete the current task my machine starts to download a new work unit. I'm thinking "Cool, it's working!".

Then I notice that the first task has stopped crunching. Frozen at 12 minutes. I can't figure what the problem is so I go to the advanced menu and click "retry communication".

This does nothing.

Then I go to the Projects tab of Rosetta and click update, thinking that this might wake up the machine.

When I go back to the Tasks tab I notice that the current task is now at about 70% finished instead of being almost completed. The time remaining is now 7hrs+.

What happened?

Has anyone else ever had this happen to them?

I think this may be the second time this has happened. Is my machine doomed to work the same task over and over again?

Thanks in advance,

Jingy

The best advice I can give to you about BOINC: Leave it alone - it knows what it's doing :)

Often BOINC will stop crunching a work unit when it decides it needs to switch to another project to fulfill your project ratio settings. Maybe it decided it had to move on to one of your other projects at that point. BOINC doesn't complete a whole work unit at a time - it almost always stops in the middle of individual work units to switch to another project.

BOINC's behavior often looks funny if you sit there in watch it. In the long term it's doing exactly what we tell it to.

---

Hi Rob,

this is absolutely normal. BOINC downloaded a new workunit because your first one would be finished in a few minutes. Then the second one started crunching, the first one stopped. You don't have to do anything, BOINC does everything for you. ;) You could manually set "No new work" and stop the second workunit, and you'll see that the first one will continue.

EDIT: Too late. :/