BOINC Manager pop-up: Communicating with client, please wait

This pop-up will come up at any time that BOINC Manager cannot communicate with the client.

- This can happen when you didn't allow the BOINC binary and the BOINC Manager binary through your firewall on TCP port 31416.
In this case, just allow both of these binaries (in Windows boinc.exe and boincmgr.exe) to pass through your firewall. The BOINC binary needs to be able to get onto the internet on TCP ports 80 and 443 as well.

- This can happen when you have far too many tasks in queue for BOINC Manager to display in real-time.

BOINC Manager is a graphical user interface that makes it easier for you to give commands to the client (BOINC). It talks through remote procedure calls with the client (hence why it needs to go through the firewall). It will update the times on tasks that are running and show messages in the Messages tab/Event Log. The update rate for all this is once a second.

As an example, when you have 1,200 tasks in queue, it will take BOINC 1.5 seconds to read and digest that information. As you can imagine, there is no way to compress that into the 1 second refresh rate, while with the more tasks you have in queue this time will only go up.
Which is why the developers have chosen another thing, the "Show all tasks/Show active tasks" button, which is on (showing "Show all tasks") by default and which will hide all tasks that are not running.

This means that only the tasks that are actually running, have run for a bit and are waiting to run and those that are suspended, will show in your Tasks tab.
Those waiting to start, waiting to be reported, downloading, uploading and aborted will not show in this list, since they aren't considered active.

Scenario: You pressed the "Show all tasks" button and now you can't get it to reverse. There's no time to press the button again.

On Windows:
Exit BOINC Manager.
Start->Run, type regedit, click OK.

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Space Sciences Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley\BOINC Manager\Tasks
and change the value of ActiveTasksOnly from 0 to 1.
Then start BOINC Manager. Changes are immediate.


On Linux:
The configuration file is in your user home directory and called .BOINC Manager (e.g. /home/remco/.BOINC Manager, this file may be hidden)
Edit the value for ActiveTasksOnly from zero to one.


On the Mac (OS X):
The configuration file is saved in /Users//Library/Preferences/BOINC Manager Preferences, edit the key word ActiveTasksOnly in the [Tasks] section.

Original writer	Original FAQ	Date
Jorden	516	08-03-2010