LHC@home

For a couple of weeks I notice that lots of my LHCb VMs suffer from very short runtimes.
Although nearly all of them get rewarded, it is an unsatisfying situation as it seems that those WUs don't really deliver scientific output.

Thus I tried to compare the efficiency of my hosts with that of other volunteers' hosts (top 40 LHCb contributors; data available to the public).
The results were not 100% decisive but gave me a strong hint that VirtualBox 5.2.x may be a factor.
I therefore downgraded VirtualBox to version 5.1.36 (the most recent 5.1.x).

All WUs I ran with VirtualBox 5.1.36 over the last weekend on different hosts had normal runtimes and the size of the result uploads is also back to normal.

@other volunteers
Did anybody made the same experience?

Had one PC (AMD-FX) that crashed with Windows Fall-Creator and Virtualbox 5.1.34.
On Boinc-Website is Virtualbox 5.1.26 with Boinc 7.8.3 the default.
This is working now for me after downgrading.

I just started up LHCb again on an Ubuntu 16.04 machine with VBox 5.2.10. Of the first 12 returned, 5 were short (including one error).
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/results.php?hostid=10544450&offset=0&show_names=0&state=0&appid=12

Also note that on the short ones, the CPU usage was low, less than about 25 percent.

But I currently have seven in process that have gone over 2 hours, so they seem OK. If the shorts remain too high, I will go back to VBox 5.1.x.
Thanks for catching it.

I would agree that 5.2.x isn't as reliable but I have had good results from LHCb with 5.2.