I have noticed that over a dozen copies (13 total) of the MLDS.exe app are running on my Win 7 machine even though there are currently no WUs in progress. There are WUs being reported as completed as recent as 11 am 9/11/21. Is this expected behavior. If I kill these tasks, will a new WU spawn a new app?

I have noticed that over a dozen copies (13 total) of the MLDS.exe app are running on my Win 7 machine even though there are currently no WUs in progress. There are WUs being reported as completed as recent as 11 am 9/11/21. Is this expected behavior. If I kill these tasks, will a new WU spawn a new app?

I would remove the project, restart Boinc, and then reattach. That typically solves issues like this.

Are they using up any CPU time? If they are, and the client says there's no WUs currently *running*, then there's an issue.

When you say there's "no WUs in progress" .. do you mean none currently running, but there are some that are partially complete but waiting for their turn again? or that there's no WUs even partially complete?

There are two reasons why I can think there may be stray executable threads sitting around. One is that the client (especially on windows) sometimes spawns threads which aren't actually use, so they're harmless, not using any compute power, and we just ignore them. The other is if the WU is in progress but the client suspends it for some reason (because it's time to run another project, for example), by default the client will keep the executable loaded in memory but paused.. so it again doesn't use any CPU resources, but does use up memory. This is done so that resuming is much easier. I think there's a BOINC client setting to change that default behavior and force suspended WUs to unload the exe from memory.

IF the client says that no mlc WUs are running or in progress, AND there are mlds processes still running and consuming CPU time, then that's a bug that needs to be fixed.

I removed the MLC project, restarted the client and killed all the mlds.exe task that were running. I then reattached the MLC project. One WU has completed and a second is in progress. Two mlds.exe tasks appear in Task manager; one is showing CPU usage and varying amounts of memory in use., the other is showing 0 CPU % but varying amounts of memory. I guess it is possible these are both threads for the same WU. When reviewing the BOINC client event log, there are error messages corresponding to the completed WU. I have copied the latest set of messages. I will continue to monitor to verify that there are no lingering tasks.

9/12/2021 4:44:22 PM | MLC@Home | Starting task ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1
9/12/2021 9:56:41 PM | MLC@Home | Sending scheduler request: To fetch work.
9/12/2021 9:56:41 PM | MLC@Home | Requesting new tasks for CPU
9/12/2021 9:56:47 PM | MLC@Home | Scheduler request completed: got 1 new tasks
9/12/2021 9:56:47 PM | MLC@Home | Project requested delay of 31 seconds
9/12/2021 9:56:49 PM | MLC@Home | Started download of ParityModified-1630380152-25517-6
9/12/2021 9:56:50 PM | MLC@Home | Finished download of ParityModified-1630380152-25517-6
9/12/2021 10:12:38 PM | MLC@Home | [error] Can't rename output file slots/0/mlds.stderr to projects/www.mlcathome.org_mlcathome/ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1_r935545738_2: Error 32
9/12/2021 10:12:44 PM | MLC@Home | [error] Can't rename output file slots/0/mlds.stdout to projects/www.mlcathome.org_mlcathome/ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1_r935545738_3: Error 32
9/12/2021 10:12:50 PM | MLC@Home | Computation for task ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1 finished
9/12/2021 10:12:51 PM | MLC@Home | Starting task ParityModified-1630380152-25517-6_0
9/12/2021 10:12:52 PM | MLC@Home | Started upload of ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1_r935545738_0
9/12/2021 10:12:52 PM | MLC@Home | Started upload of ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1_r935545738_1
9/12/2021 10:12:55 PM | MLC@Home | Finished upload of ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1_r935545738_0
9/12/2021 10:12:55 PM | MLC@Home | Finished upload of ParityModified-1630699508-15369-1_1_r935545738_1

I continue to see evidence of "ghost" occurrences of the MLDS app after computation of WUs has completed. There a six MLDS tasks with no CPU usage reported in Task Manager.

Your tasks page shows you have nothing in progress. If you delete these tasks, they shouldn’t show as aborted on your tasks list. If they do, there is a server issue somewhere and pianoman will want to know about it. If they are simply gone after deletion, wait a couple days before getting more work and see if any reappear. You may wish to note the unique task name before doing anything so you can see if it’s the same ones popping up.

No active tasks and seven inactive instances of MLDS.EXE showing in Task Manager. I would have to conclude that they are not exiting properly at the conclusion of a WU.

Just saw same thing on one of my PC's from a task last run about 1 month sgo on this project.

Program was sitting idle using 0 cpu cycles but consumed the original allocated memory amount. It was running from the slots directory where BOINC started it.

I had to kill the running program with Windows Task Manager because even exiting BOINC did not stop it.

The slots folder still had all the files that were copied over to run the (long ago exited task) task. This might of been a task that crashed upon startup or errors out some time later.

To be safe, I deleted all the files in the slots directory before rebooting to apply the needed monthly Windows updates and so BOINC would realize the slots directory was unused upon its startup.

---

After exiting BOINC and removing the mlds tasks from Task Manager, can I safely delete the slots folders that contain the mlds.exe for any slot that is currently not in use? Are there any other BOINC files that need to be updated?

After exiting BOINC and removing the mlds tasks from Task Manager, can I safely delete the slots folders that contain the mlds.exe for any slot that is currently not in use? Are there any other BOINC files that need to be updated?

Just to be safe, after exiting BOINC and before I deleted any unused files in the SLOTS folders I made a backup of the whole BOINCdata FOLDER and all the sub-folders to a empty flash drive using the Windows GUI COPY/PASTE commands.
* That way If I broke something I could restore BOINC to it's previous state after exiting BOINC and deleting the data folder contents then copying back the saved data.
* This will take a little bit of time depending on how large the data folder is.

I don't think there is any BOINC files that need to be updated, I didn't change anything.
Modifying and/or deleting any of the files in the data folder incorrectly can cause BOINC to be inoperable forcing you to delete the data folder and do a clean install of the BOINC program or restoring the data folder from you backup copy.

As I noted in my previous post all I did was DELETE THE CONTENTS OF THE PREVIOUSLY USED SLOTS FOLDER(S) after exiting.
BOINC should (and did in my case) delete any unused SLOTS folders when you restart it.

---

This is new behavior with the new v9.90+ client, right? Not with the old one?

v9.90 moved to using a "wrapper"... where there's BOINC-provided wrapper program that runs a a generic, unmodified binary to process the code. I'd say the majority of BOINC projects run the wrapper for their clients, we were a bit of an odd duck because we modified our client to use the BOINC API directly. However, there were issues with this and pytorch (both wanted to use the SIGALRM posix signal), so we moved off of that for the latest client. It's certainly possible that the wrapper is, sometimes, on windows, not cleaning up all its child threads. But since we didn't write the wrapper (literally we're using the binary from https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/WrapperApp), I think this might be worth opening a bug report on the main BOINC github repo.

:(

Mine goes back to almost the end of August (26 Aug 2021) which I reported in post 1340 which was a v9.90 task,

I have not run any since then, let me know if you want I can try to run one or two TEST v9.96 on my Windows 8.1 PC and/or on one of my Windows 7 PC's.to see what happens.

---

This is new behavior with the new v9.90+ client, right? Not with the old one?

v9.90 moved to using a "wrapper"... where there's BOINC-provided wrapper program that runs a a generic, unmodified binary to process the code. I'd say the majority of BOINC projects run the wrapper for their clients, we were a bit of an odd duck because we modified our client to use the BOINC API directly. However, there were issues with this and pytorch (both wanted to use the SIGALRM posix signal), so we moved off of that for the latest client. It's certainly possible that the wrapper is, sometimes, on windows, not cleaning up all its child threads. But since we didn't write the wrapper (literally we're using the binary from https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/WrapperApp), I think this might be worth opening a bug report on the main BOINC github repo.

:(

Have found hundreds of mdls.exe applications in Task Manager on all Win 7 machines that have been running this app (v9.90) for several days.
The tasks aren't using CPU but each consume between 1k and 250k of memory and disk space.
The machines were running out of memory and/or BOINC disk space trashing this project and other project work.
The app is unfit for continuous use on Windows 7 uness you are rebooting every couple of days or prepared to regularly go and kill these ghost tasks in Task Manager.