Dimes Faq

primesuspect

It has become painfully obvious that we need a DIMES faq. Anybody want to volunteer?

Linc

Or, if you don't have time for an entire FAQ, can you post at least one problem/question and solution/answer you've discovered?

Donut

Links- Dimes Forums, Forums
Dimes Stats, Stats
Free DC stats,3rd party stats

Donut

There seems to be a memory leak in the Dimes software, the developers are aware of it and trying to fix it. In the meantime you might have to restart the client every couple of days. Not all of my machines are experiencing this problem tho.

Media

Here are some reference links with good info on Dimes:

Stats:

Dimes own stats: http://www.netdimes.org/data.php

Execellent Dimes stats from the Free-DC team (covers all teams):

http://stats.free-dc.org/new/teamstats.php?proj=dimes&team=Team+Short-Media
http://stats.free-dc.org/new/projpage.php?proj=dimes
http://stats.free-dc.org/new/allteams.php?proj=dimes

Dimes info:

http://www.netdimes.org/index.html

Other Dimes Forums (for reference):

http://www.netdimes.org/phpBB2/

http://free-dc.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=79

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/122097561/m/817009733731

Media

Dimes does not run on Win 98 or Win ME at this time (ver. 0.4)

There is a Linux client that can be obtained. For you Linux guys go to this link for more info:
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/danss...imes_index.html

Download page
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/labs/danss...x/download.html

Media

Small stream of Dimes FAQ info:

The Dime client will upload the collected measurements up to 4 times an hour (when it gets 240KB of data to send).

You can adjust the rate that the Dimes client will ask for new addresses to trace. The defaut setting is NOT the fastest, so if you have not viewed the preferences you CAN speed up the client a bit by reducing the time to get new addresses to 15 seconds.

15 seconds is currently (and probably for ever) the quickest you can set the client. This is to help prevent your system from being ID'ed by your ISP as some form of hacker. Here is a quote from the Dimes forum:

Byron said: "The main reason why it's not faster is so as not to set of IDSs. Intrusion detection systems might create false alarms thinking that you're "ping scanning" the network searching for "online" hosts. We really don't want to upset network admins on remote networks or even our own networks "

If you quit the client (or it quits on its own-can happen with ver. 0.4) you have not lost your current set of measurements. The client saves where it is when the client quits. The client will send the completed work to the Dimes server the next time it is launched, before getting its next work.

The Dimes client can use either ICMP or UDP packets to get the info it needs. You can test whether your system/firewall/ISP will allow either or both from within the Preferences of the client. DO this test and then select the one that is not blocked. UDP is preferable if available (so Dimes says). If both are blocked, then you are either hosed, or you need to edit some firewall settings.

Donut

Donut wrote:

There seems to be a memory leak in the Dimes software, the developers are aware of it and trying to fix it. In the meantime you might have to restart the client every couple of days. Not all of my machines are experiencing this problem tho.

Update: It looks like the "memory leak" was a server side problem with the way it was issueing work. If you restart the client all should be well. I've had 1 rig going for about 36hrs. and it's only up to 41meg. (instead of 70 or 80 in the same time frame.)

Was posted in the Dimes forums but I'm to lazy to link it up.

primesuspect

Thanks for the update, donut!

mmonnin

44mb on one computer and its been running for a day. Usually it would be higher. Other 2 are at 44 and 35 but they were just restarted. Looks better.

lemonlime

Anyone know if they resolved that memory usage issue? I came home last night greeted with a 'out of virtual memory' error message. It bunked my fah_core78 as well as a result, and lost an 80% finished WU

In the mean time, I've been stopping and starting my client, which doesnt always work well. i.e. I forget

mmonnin

I thought they did. They was an issue on the server side that was making the memory usage increase with time.

lemonlime

mmonnin wrote:

I thought they did. They was an issue on the server side that was making the memory usage increase with time.

Very odd, it happened to me again yesterday, totally chewed up all of my ram and pagefile. Only took about 12 hours to occur as well. I'm going to reinstall the dimes agent and see what happens.. It doesn't happen on my sempron box, only my main rig for some reason..