In discussions on the WCG board there are posts to do with issues with bandwidth and files needing several attempts to download them. Seeing that there are a lot of files for each task, what are the pros and cons of zipping them into a much lower number of larger files as opposed to having lots of smaller files.

Not looking for solutions, just a bit more understanding.

We had that type of problem at GPUGrid. Project administrators tend to be more comfortable with Linux than Windows, so they sent out an app with a .gz archive, and tried to unpack it with tar. Apparently Windows 10 has a native tar app, but Windows 7 doesn't. I suggested 7-zip, and they got that working - not as versatile as tar, but it worked.

My first copy of WinZip came on a paid-for floppy disk, but Windows added native zip, somewhere down the line. And then took it out again from Windows 11.

Standards are tricky things - there are too many of them, and you have to support them all.

Standards are tricky things - there are too many of them, and you have to support them all.

So, maybe less of a problem for projects that send different task types to different operating systems. (Is CPDN the only project that does this?)

Most projects try to send all their apps to as many platforms as possible, but come can't manage them all. I think a specialist policy for a complicated project like CPDN would be fair enough.