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General
Caution for Computer Use:
Do not run your
computer at all (much less continously), when ...
- weather is too hot and you have no appropriate cooling
system.
- you have no appropriate backup system. The cheapest way
to do that nowadays is to buy an extra hard disk drive that
you copy your data to, before you leave your computer.
If your OS
crashes due to unknown reasons while the simulator is running,
reboot. Most of the time everything will be OK after that,
as there can be a million reasons, that lead to a crash. If
you find bugs in the simulator that make it crash or special
applications, that seem to interfere with it, we would like
you to inform
us. Although we can not promise to solve the problem, we want
to watch it closely, as we want to provide you with a computing
experience as pleasant as possible.
Known
problems and their solution with Simulator005
After
starting the simulator for the first time, the computer works
as crazy and the User Interface does not allow interactions
any more.
Most
probably you have entered an upper RAM limit that is too high
for your system. Please bear in mind, that you need not only
the RAM for the simulations, the computers operating system
and the programs you are working with, need memory too. When
you allow simulations that need too much RAM, modern operating
systems write parts of the RAM to the hard disk, only to reload
them when needed. The structure of the simulator, however,
keeps such systems extremely busy, as virtually all RAM dedicated
to a simulator is actually needed. Since these memory management
processes run at a very high priority on your system, they
may effectively block the User Interface and all other programs.
Solution:
Stop the simulator, no matter how. Then either delete the
preferences file in the simulators folder (and answer all
corresponding questions anew, but this time with a lower RAM
limit) or edit the corresponding line in the preferences file
with a text editor. If you do not know exactly what upper
limit you should enter, then enter a number that is smaller
than half of the Megabytes RAM available on your computer.
Slowing
down of CPU-intense applications like image-processing, some
printer-drivers and others ...
If you have release
1-4, you should immediately update to 6 or later, as there is
a dramatic change in this aspect. After release 5 simulators
use only CPU-idle time under Windwos.
If you have a CPU-intensive application running, then the simulator
will slow down its performance on a Macintosh. To solve this,
you might quit the simulator (and loose a bit of simulation
data from the last run) or or stop it temporarily to allow continuation
of the simulation after you have completed your CPU-intense
task. To do that, rename the file "break filetemplate.txt"
to "break.txt"in the simulators folder (or move a
copy of an empty file with that name to the simulators folder).
The simulator will notice its presence, stop computation immediately
and rename the break-file back to "break filetemplate.txt".
Then it displays a user-dialog that allows you (among other
thins) to chose normal continuation of the simulation after
your CPU is free again. You may increase the responsiveness
of you Mac by decreasing the number of individuals computed
every time the simulator is given control over the CPU. You
find that parameter in the preferences-file.
Under Windows, CPU-intense applications generally get all the
CPU-power they need, as the simulator uses the lowest priority
possible. However, on some computers Windows is not really fast
to get low priority programs out of the way, so you may notice
a difference. If this is a problem, then stop the simulator
before your CPU has to do such work and start it again later.
MacOS - Bring the simulator to background:
If you try to hide the simulators window while it is running,
then you can not click in the menu bar. You will have to click
anywhere else to bring the simulator to the background and
then select "hide others" from the programs menu.
General - Bad RAM quality:
Continous high performance computing may expose problems
with RAM-modules that otherwise would not surface. If your
simulator repeatedly crashes unpredictably with a Windows
dialog message like "Unhandled exception: c0000090 At
Adress: 00411d2c"after running for enough time to heat
up the system, then this might turn out to be the problem.
As the simulation uses a significant part of its RAM for pointers,
a single bit among those millions in RAM that can not be set
correctly might surface earlier (in form of a crash) than
in other applications. If you think you have this problem,
then shut down your system and let it cool down over night.
Then boot it the next day and continue the simulation. If
the crash still happens, try to get an estimate on how long
it takes before the crash happens. Then (if possible) try
to run the same simulation on another computer. If the crash
does not happen there repeatedly, you might want to get correct
RAM-modules from your local vendor. If you bought a new computer
or new RAM, you definitively should run the current simulator
for something like 4 weeks with as much RAM as possible to
check for such RAM quality problems.
Error: Unhandled exception: c0000090 At Adress: 00411d2c
After that, the only option you are given, is closing
the simulator (or seeing some obscure details). See general
bad RAM qualitiy problems above.
Simulator performance is low
and a check with the task menu shows that it gets only
about 6% of the CPU performance. This may be due to either
other background services using the CPU or to some really
strange things going on with your system. You may want to
check for trojans constantly monitoring your system.
Security: Running the simulator at weekends...
Currently, the simulator needs to be started as any other
program. This means that you need an open user account to
start the simulator automatically or manually. However, if
you logoff, the simulator will be closed, as all other programs.
If you now leave for weekend and want your simulator to continue
to run, you have to either
- Lock the door of the room with the computer with a key
no untrusted person has access to
- Hide / encrypt all critical data on your disk in such
a way that nobody can make use of it
- Have a screen saver with a good password and boot-protection
(This however, is likely to reduce simulator performance)
If you can do neither, we suggest you stop the simulator
and close your user account to make sure your data remains
secure.
Preferences
problems.
If the simulator appeared to reject your changes to the
preferences, then
- Stop the
simulator, edit the preferences and then start it again.
As it reads preferences once at the beginning, and writes
them back with updated local computing statistics, preferences
changes can be overwritten
- You may
have tried to edit one of the fixed fields like CPU type
or OS. These are determined automatically by very crude
C code and may not actually describe your system. It does
not help if you try to edit them, as the simulator comes
back to the automatic values all the time. Put all additional
details about your computer in the the "Systemdetails
known" field. This is not changed.
Whatever you
do, do not try to change preferences in the results-file.
This will invalidate your results and lead to automated exclusion,
as such changes lead to conflicts with the checksum that ensures
reliability of results transmission.
Known
Bugs
Simulator005
release 1-5 have a bug in their Poisson random number derivate
generator that makes mutations appear too rarely, if the mutation
rate is below 0.001. Only a fraction of all results received
was affected by this problem.
Solution: Upgrade to release 6.
Under all Macintosh
releases the operating system may be not specified correctly
in the preferences (and thus in the results).
Windows XP x64
Issues
Simulator005 release 6 will sometimes hang 64-bit versions
of Windows XP Pro if the simulator runs for an extended period
of time. This is possibly caused by the simulator running
within the 32-bit emulator. It is not clear if the problem
is with the simulator or the emulator. A future
Microsoft Update may fix the problem.
Solution: Small run files seem less likely to trigger
the problem. The problem is also less likely to occur if the
simulator is run for short periods of time. So this probably
won't be an issue if the computer is turned off every night.
Otherwise, upgrade to the 64-bit version of the simulator
when it becomes available. Unfortunately it will probably
take some time until the 64-bit will become available.
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