Option to completely disable checkpointing

[smoe]

I find that for users of laptops (who just suspend everything) and for those who run BOINC on their 24/7 servers, the concept of checkpoints is a bit like from the past. In my mind, today this mostly disturbs by spinning up hard drives, especially (as it just happened for me) when checkpointing was done too frequently becaues of bad parameter settings.

You may argue that just by putting a large number as a checkpoint interval, this may be sufficient to disable it. To me, this would be a way for a quick internal implementation, but the user should be offered that "disable checkpointing" box to be very sure to avoid the overhead.

[AenBleidd]

Hello Steffen,

I'd like to add that it would be great to have a separate option (maybe not separate but anyway) to disable checkpoints for VMs because when running multiple VMs (8 in my case) and all of them start cueckpointing it lead to system lags because if 100% usage of hard drive. Maybe it would be better to make checkpoints optionally when boinc suspending. This will lead to time increase to complete suspending and also may lead to potential data lost but in overall this will make the system more responsive.

Thanks

Best regards, Vitalii

Sent via Android

[lfield]

Checkpoints can already be disabled for VMs. LHC@home has disabled them. For projects such as RNA world, checkpoints do make sense but they can be disabled if you modify the job.xml. The xml tag is: <disable_automatic_checkpoints/> However this is not documented. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VboxApps

We should probably move the documentation to git so it can be updated a the same time as the code.

[AenBleidd]

As I see this is an option in job.xml. But from my POV it is rather better to have this option in cc_config.xml to be able to disable checkpoints for all VMs of all projects.

[homersimpsons]

A 0 value could mean disabled.

[smoe]

This "spinning up hard drives" in my original post is no longer ultimately relevant, I tend to think. Still, it just feels right to have and I should have a look. If there were not already too many other things to do.