http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.72

Lots of bug fixes as well as new features.

Hopefully we now see an updated GPU SDK with the newer CUDA. :)

The plan is to upgrade to 2.72 this Tuesday, no promises though.
Before that there is going to be a short break.

Maybe this Tuesday? :)

Hm.. that's odd - the new clients were actually deployed last Tuesday (you can check the date stamp on the files on the download server). Now that I take a closer look at the results from the test session it seems like all the results were done by old clients rather than the new one even though the old clients were marked as deprecated in the DB. BOINC usually doesn't behave like that...

I'll look into it and start a new test.

[Edit:] Even BOINC's own app page has last Tuesday as the installation timestamp... odd.

There we go - BOINC just needed to be restarted to read in the new values. Usually this happens automatically when updating apps but last week it went wrong and it reloaded the old values instead of the new ones.

Wow, this seems like a really bad release, at least for me.

All of a sudden my system was being nailed, it seems the new client is hammering it. Nothing else can function whilst I have Blender processes running. Browsers lag like crazy, playing a game is completely out the question.

I could do anything I wanted with the previous client as the process priorities seemed to work, which now don't. :/

Seems like I/O activity for 2457 is through the roof, though tasks seem to complete and validate without error.

---

Click here to see My Detailed BOINC Stats

Hm, doesn't look as if my machine has problems with the client or the session, three WUs did finish without an error so far...

Edit:
Some of them with a previous owner do seem to have errored out, but these were Linux.

---

Life is Science, and Science rules. To the universe and beyond
Proud member of BOINC@Heidelberg
My BOINC-Stats

It looks like there was a performance bug with the windows version of Blender that caused the devs to push a temporary fix - a new wrapper around Blender. This new wrapper seems to clash pretty heavily with the process control system used with BOINC and BURP. It causes a few things to happen:

• No or incorrect CPU time is reported for WUs
  
• Blender uses (almost) twice the usual number of cores. If BOINC settings are set to 4 it will use 6-8
  
• Process controls are not working correctly. Process and thread priority set by BURP has almost no effect
  
• Pausing/Resuming/Stopping a WU may result in arbitrary errors/crashes
  

Some systems are much more severely affected than others.

A new Windows client will be out ASAP trying to fix this issue. The issue is also related to OpenMP use of environment variables in Blender.

4.96 is out for Windows. It contains a merge of the recent changes from the GPU clients (should now correctly abort workunits) and also contains a new Blender 2.72 which hopefully solves some of the issues mentioned in this thread.

Nice quick fix, thanks. Will post back again with results when it's providing Windows clients with new WU's. (There aren't any as of writing.)

* No or incorrect CPU time is reported for WUs

Aha, and I wondered why the CPU time was almost 0 for the WUs I crunched. Good that CreditNew seems to be based on the run time, there would have been no credits at all then. ;-)

* Pausing/Resuming/Stopping a WU may result in arbitrary errors/crashes

Well, that isn't really a difference than before as far as I experienced...

The 4.96-client seems to crunch good so far, already finished some WUs with it.

---

Life is Science, and Science rules. To the universe and beyond
Proud member of BOINC@Heidelberg
My BOINC-Stats

Yup, can perform tasks normally whilst it renders in the background again.

Is it 2.72b or 2.72a?