Several Questions about Seti.

1. Is there anyway to push the SETI Program faster? I briefly read through the FAQ of some ways in which seems like the quickest way to crunch units was to keep it in the background running minimized. Now I hear there is one without the whistles and oooo's and ahhh's and runs on a command prompt and of which you can run multiple instances. Can you crunch workunits faster with that program? I've tried bumping up the priority from low to normal then to high and saw no difference. I even changed the affinity from 2 cpu's to 1 cpu (I'm on a HT Chip) and saw very little change in my times. Even though I am crunching out Units at an average of little over 3 hours which is pretty good comparably, I just want to see if I can push those times.

2. Is the WorkUnits difference sizes? I've seen them differ from minutes but not a whole lot.

3. Now obvoiusly if anything was found the signal would of been several years old of the time of the "transmission" going to earth. Has anybody found anything interesting? I tried googling but barely anything came up. I was wondering if anybody or somebody found anything worthwhile.

Thankz in advance to your answers. I am eager to get involved in this because I was interested in it years ago but as life changed I lost interest. Today I do have the time and resources to get involved so here I am.

Originally posted by DJSpellBound
1. Is there anyway to push the SETI Program faster?

I use the command line version. Runs twice as fast as the Gui Version. I love to look at the pretty numbers, so I use SetiHide... Great tool for the command line version. If you use he GUI, take off the screensaver definately.

2. Is the WorkUnits difference sizes? I've seen them differ from minutes but not a whole lot.

They are the same size from what I have hear, the differences will depend on how much you use the system. The SETI is run with a priority of LOW, so it slows processing if you are doing anything. You could raise this, but your system will run super slow if you try to do anything. Never put it in Realtime.... ha ha I did this one... It was cool, but cannot do anything....

3. Now obvoiusly if anything was found the signal would of been several years old of the time of the "transmission" going to earth. Has anybody found anything interesting?

Here is a link to the msot promising signals setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu...

[edit on 16-6-2004 by JCMinJapan]

Hey thankz for the response. I will check out the command prompt one tonight.

Hi JCMinJapan!!

Very many thanx for the 4kWU "donation" to the ATS SETI@home team - it's really helped "swell the coffers"!!

I hope you've found the answers you were looking for DJSB? Good luck with running the program!!

Yes. I did. Though I have another question.

Why is it such a pain in the ass to connect?
I was connecting fine a couple of days ago and the last 2 days I've had connection issues with grabbing WU's. I'm currently trying to snag 10 right now so I don't have to worry about connectinf for awhile. The server status page says that everything seems to be fine.

Wait....Now there's this

Data Acquisition Status
Disabled: We are currently turned off at Arecibo Observatory. This may be due to hardware maintenance or another project at the Observatory is transmitting (and we are purposefully shut off to avoid aquisition of data contaminated with large bursts of radio frequency interference).

Being a "Newb" would this effect grabbing new WU's?

[edit on 18-6-2004 by DJSpellBound]

Close. Just above that it shows:

Data Server Status

The data server is up and running, but dropping connections

Right now the data server machine is up, but not all clients are able to connect. This is due to our server being swamped with requests, and usually happens right after a server outage, or if there are greater network/database problems we are currently trying to fix. Please try connecting later.

That's what is making connection for uploading/downloading problematic. It'll straighten out in a bit. I hope so, at least. My cache is empty!

Right that part showed fine for myself prior to me posting for several hours as the server status being good.

What does the second part pertain to?

The main dish just isn't collecting new data for some reason. There is usually a huge backlog of work to be processed, so it won't have much of an impact on the project.

That is why I cache 25 .... I figure they can be down for about 5 days and I can process...

Originally posted by JCMinJapan
That is why I cache 25 .... I figure they can be down for about 5 days and I can process...

Good idea... that's exactly what I just did.