We continue to experience problems due to the overloaded connection from U.C. Berkeley to the rest of the Internet. These problems are described here
Starting on 2/24 we began buying an additional 20 Mbps of bandwidth, at a cost of $6000 per month. Fortunately, we have received a number of generous donations that have offset this cost.
The additional bandwidth has helped,
but it hasn't completely solved the problem.
This is shown in the following graphs.
The above graph shows the average time it takes for our server
to send a work unit.
Before the current problems started, the average was a few seconds.
But now, because the UCB Internet connection is overloaded,
the average often reaches 200 seconds or more.
When this happens, there is no point in accepting more connections;
that would make the problem even worse.
So the number of active connections is limited to 1,500 or so.
When this limit is reached, and more connection requests arrived,
they are "dropped", and the client sees a
"Can't connect to server" error message.
The above graph shows the number of dropped connections
over the last week.
During the weekend (2/23-24) the number was almost zero.
Today it has increased again.
We would like this number to always be zero.
We're exploring a number of options that will give us all the bandwidth we need, for a lot less than $300/Mbps/month. This may take a few weeks, so please bear with us.
A number of users have complained that when the Windows client fails to connect, it puts up an error dialog and doesn't try to reconnect until this dialog is dismissed. This is a bug - we intended that the client should continue retrying without user intervention.
The bug will be fixed in a new version of the Windows client. This will be available in a few days; check our web site. Meanwhile, there is a workaround.
A SETI@home user has developed a program called SETIQueue that acts like a "substitute" SETI@home server; you can instruct clients to connect to a SETIQueue server instead of our server. The SETIQueue server can download multiple workunits from our server (perhaps during the night, when there is more bandwidth). This scheme lets your clients stay busy even when they can't connect to our server.
You can download SetiQueue and run it on your own Windows computer. Or you can take advantage of several "public" SETIQueue servers that have been set up. A list of these is at SETIfaq.org (note: this page currently can be viewed from Internet Explorer, but not Netscape).