FB Sprint 2026 Notifications

[UBT - Timbo]

Yeah, where is the fun to just "donate money and forget about it" ? "hobby" means "have a level of implication", else it's not a hobby, in my views.

Hiya

Some people (aka philanthropists) are quite happy to make donations to organisations that they want to support and without asking for any publicity for this. Other will make donations in whatever way they can, such as paying for groceries that are given to "food banks". And of course, BOINC members give up some of their CPU cycles to assist various research projects.

And 24+ years on from when BOINC was first developed (February 2002) and first released (10th April 2002), it is still being used by many volunteers and projects (although I think the "golden age" of BOINC has long since passed )

The wiki says this:

As a high-performance volunteer computing platform, BOINC brings together 34,236 active participants employing 136,341 active computers (hosts) worldwide, processing daily on average 20.164 PetaFLOPS as of 16 November 2021

The current BOINCstats says there are now just 24,065 active members (as of 6th July 2026) which is 0.59% of the total number of registered BOINC members:

https://www.boincstats.com/stats/-1/project/detail/user

and now only 130,853 hosts (as of 6th July 2026):

https://www.boincstats.com/stats/-1/project/detail/host

And regarding money impact on cruncher production, it is always the same : crunchers with big money will get either big personal configuration(s), either big rented host(s) (or both). But we don't

If there was a simple way to be able to "count" the number of active members (or even active hosts) in a FB "team" then it is possible a more level playing field could be organised.

So, for now, it can only be done by monitoring the BOINC credits earned in each Sprint and working out the average BOINC credits earned for each Team (and also for each individual Member). So at least similar teams and members configurations of "host CPU/GPU" crunching ability, can be allocated to specific leagues.

regards
Tim

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all

The latest Sprint, featuring MilkyWay project, got underway yesterday at 1600 UTC.

And just so you know:

1) It seems the MilkyWay project website is sometimes timing out, if you try to view their website - even logging in, is very slow.

2) The stats for the Sprint *are* being collected, but again, due to the MilkyWay website being sluggish, so some of the regular stats collecting processes are NOT taking place and they are being delayed.

This seems to have affected the display of Team stats such as here:

https://www.formulaboinc.org/sprints.py ... printid=64

Note: Members individual stats are being displayed, but updates might not be regular:

https://www.formulaboinc.org/sprints.py ... printid=64


Both these pages were last updated at 08:45 UTC

I have advised Sebastien about this, but of course, if the project website server is being overloaded or it is just running slowly, then the FB stats pages may not be updated as regularly.

Hopefully, this will be resolved over the next 2-3 days.

regards
Tim

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all

I've been in contact with one of the MilkyWay admins to make them aware (if they didn't already know) that their project website is not running very well, with difficulties logging in and and responding to clickable links within the website itself.

Likewise, obtaining regular stats updates from the MilkyWay website is still very intermittent...

I've used the FB admin function to try to force some manual "stats updates" but if the MilkyWay website is under heavier than normal load, then such "requests" do not always work...and it's too time consuming to be clicking on the "Update stats" link (in the FB back-office section) every 5 minutes

Normally the FB stats collection takes place automatically about every 15 minutes...but the last one was at 1330 UTC - with the previous one at around 0830 UTC. So, I hope the admins can resolve this soon.

regards
Tim

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all

Update: MilkyWay website and Sprint data

The Team and Member stats collection process now seems to be working with the latest stats collected at 20:45 UTC this evening.

And I'm happy to report that the incremental BOINC credits log file is now showing the relevant change in Team and Member credits, since the previous data download.

So, hopefully the Team League tables will be updated in due course, just as the Member League table have been.

regards
Tim

[UBT - Timbo]

Hi all

I've been in contact with one of the MilkyWay admins to make them aware (if they didn't already know) that their project website is not running very well, with difficulties logging in and and responding to clickable links within the website itself.

<snip>

Update #2: Message from MilkyWay admin:

Hello,

I apologize about the slowness of the server. The server is still being hit by bots and they are keeping it very busy. Requests are having to wait a long time before the server answers, sometimes 30-60 seconds. I believe that is why your system logs "Unable to get file" — it gives up waiting before our server responds. The file itself is fine, the server is just too slow to hand it over in time.

Looking at our logs, your nightly downloads of team.gz and user.gz did complete successfully each night, including the night before the sprint started. So the team data made it to you at least once. If there is any way to re-run the team stats for this sprint on your end, our teams would really appreciate it.

I am making changes today to block the bot traffic and speed the server back up. I am also planning to update our stats more often than once a day. I will let you know once things are running normally again.

regards
Tim

[JeromeC]

It seems team stats are still not displaying, though, I see nothing below the header. For user I have stats.

Strange that if some were successfully extracted at some point that they cannot be displayed, even if it's an "old" data (with corresponding update time).

And it says "Last update : 2026-07-18 17:45 UTC" on the blank team page, but maybe that's just the user stat time that is used for both ?

[UBT - Timbo]

It seems team stats are still not displaying, though, I see nothing below the header. For user I have stats.

Strange that if some were successfully extracted at some point that they cannot be displayed, even if it's an "old" data (with corresponding update time).

And it says "Last update : 2026-07-18 17:45 UTC" on the blank team page, but maybe that's just the user stat time that is used for both ?

Hiya

Yes, the Team stats are still not being displayed

Sadly, this is out of my control, so I am reliant on Sebastien to fix this - and hopefully he can make an adjustment as the stats are regularly collected for both Teams and Members - so if the log files are retained after each "data collection" process,then it'll be easy to populate the League tables.

The Team page now shows "Last update : 2026-07-19 09:15 UTC" so, if this is true and a successful "data collection" download is on the FB server, then hopefully these stats can augment any other Team stats collected over the last few days.

regards
Tim

[Tamagoch]

It seems like all the teams were disqualified from Belgian GP
Hopefully it's just a stucked script or something. If the stats data from updates still there, I beleive Sebastien could recover it.

[JeromeC]

I sent a PM to Sebastien on our forum yesterday but I don't have any feedback yet...

[JeromeC]

Seb answered me and I now have a clear understanding of the problem, and it's not as simple as it looks.

Empty team stats in this Milkyway sprint are not due to "temporary problem of Milky server" but the webRPC API (standard documented boinc) that Seb is using to fetch the team stats, that should be "open to the public", has been "closed" and requires an authentication (some account), it's not open to the public anymore.

The webRPC API used to fetch individual stats is still open, this is why we have individual stats in the sprint.

The marathon stats are fetched with a different method, reading xml files that are generated by the project into a specific public folder on the project server: these stats are not frequently updated and are not suitable for a sprint.

So until the Milkyway admin solves this problem (the webRPC API for team stats should be public), if he does, we won't be able to have sprint for Milkyway anymore...

Timbo : you have a contact with that admin already, can you please forward him this ? I'm not sure if he is exactly aware of the situation.