How can I limit the receipt of tasks to those that will complete within 4 hours?

How can I limit the receipt of tasks to those that will complete within 4 hours?

That depends a lot on the projects you are attached to. CPDN doesn't have anything that takes less than about 8hours even on the fastest machines. A lot of projects have a section you can reach through the "Your Account" page where you can tick which application types you accept. On some you will also need to un-check accepting other types of work if none available for selected task types.

First step is to choose projects that supply such tasks - CPDN is one to avoid.
You may find that some projects will not tell the truth about task duration so they can "swamp" your cache with tasks the project says will take an hour, but in reality will take several hours.

Keep your cache VERY small, say "store at least 0.1 days" + "store up to an additional 0.01 days". This will help filter out long duration tasks, but, sadly doesn't prevent the odd longer task appearing.

I have "Einstein@Home" which is the main offender sending 12-18 hour jobs, and Milkyway@home which sends jobs I can tolerate under 5 hours.
Some of the Einstein@home jobs are ok at 2-5 hours, and I have been aborting the longer ones. But if I abort them does someone else get them or do they go unsearched?

Aborted tasks are sent out to another user.

First you have to identify which subproject (application) of Einstein tasks the ones that you want to do belong to. Then at Einstein web site you go to your project preferences and select only that application. See what preference set (General/Home/Work/School) your computer is set to and modify the preference settings to accept only that application.

[b]APPLICATIONS[/b]
Run only the selected applications
[] Binary Radio Pulsar Search (Arecibo)
[] Binary Radio Pulsar Search (Arecibo, fast)
[] Binary Radio Pulsar Search (MeerKAT)
[] Gamma-ray pulsar search #5
[] Gamma-ray pulsar binary search #1 (GPU)
[] Gravitational Wave search O3 All-Sky
[] Multi-Directional Gravitational Wave search on O3 (GPU)
[] Multi-Directional Gravitational Wave search on O3 (CPU)

Select this setting also to [b]NO[/b]:
[b]Allow non-preferred apps:[/b]
YES | [b]NO[/b]
If no work for selected applications are available, accept tasks from other applications?

It depends on the project, and how long their tasks are expected to run.

(As an aside, on Rosetta@Home they have an option where you can pick the task length, from 2 hours to 1.5 days, in increments of two hours. There's no guarantee that every task will only run that long, though.)

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https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/

I have not seen that option for rosetta@home, anywhere. Can you point me to where it is please?

Thanks!

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https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/prefs.php?subset=project, edit preferences, change Target CPU run time, save.

Many thanks!

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