I have been using BOINC Interface since last December when SETI shutdown. At the time I also created a new account with Einstein since SETI was having problems with thier Srevers and not delivering work units.
In my General preferences I have it set for 50% work on each project and switch projects every 60 minutes. My Internet connection is a slow dialup and I connect generally every day. I have my work load set for 5 days so if I go away for a few days I won't run out of work.
The computer runs 24/7 and is not used for anything very instensive so over the course of 24 hours I do with in minutes 24 hours worth of work.
One problem I have is that BOINC does not change projects every 60 minutes as set in preferences. It will only work on one project for days at a time. Second problem which may be related to first is that BOINC gets anal about down loading work units from only one project for days at a time.
For example about a week ago BOINC was working on SETI work units and only requesting SETI work units to download. Then it started requesting Einstein work units but kept working on SETI until all the SETI work units were done but still only requesting and downloading Einstien work units.
Then it worked exclusively on EinStein and requested and down loaded Einstein WUs for a few days then 4 days ago it requested and got a download from SETI. For the last three days SETI has not been delivering any work units because of of cleanup they are doing but BOINC still is only requesting work from SETI and I am now down to less than 2 days worth of workunits.
Any ideas as to what is going wrong or how to get BOINC to average out the work better?

Thanks

Paul

duplicate post

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

again duplicate :)

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

Switch between applications every 60 minutes is not a hard project switch, instead it tells the Boinc manager to check its work status at that time to see if it should change to work on another project, it also does this when it completes a WU. It looks at your queue to see if any WU is in danger of not being returned on time, and also check your short term debt before deciding which unit to work on. Similarly, Boinc checks your long term debt to determine what projects to DL from to follow your resource share.

You can read about the Work Scheduler in the BOINC Wiki.

The 5 days setting that you're using means a total of 10 days of work with 2 projects which is probably forcing Boinc to continuously run in panic mode. It sound like you have too much work on hand and are always running in Earliest Deadline First and Highest Debt First mode. I would suggest that you temporarily reduce your queue to 2 or 3 days to allow Boinc to rebalance itself. This could take a week or more especially with the current server problems.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

The work scheduler thinks it needs more seti to balance out your requested "resource share", so it's only requesting work from seti. Since seti isn't giving work, it just keeps requesting it, while finishing your existing cache of work. When you're actually out of work, it will get work from any attached project it can (so it'll keep busy). It always tries to balance the resource share, where that doesn't affect deadlines, of course.

What you're seeing is normal activity.

tony

OK guys I have read the Wiki description of what is supposed to happen and I have read your posts.

On Thursday the 30th I resumed network activity and again BOINC only asked for work from SETI and again there was no response since SETI was still down.

After this I read the posts and Wiki and I changed my Preferances to 2.5 days as suggested and did an update on both SETI and Einstein only Einstein updated since since SETI was not responding.

On Friday the 31st SETI finally came back on and BOINC again only requested work from SETI and it downloaded 4.5 days work. Before the download I had just over 3 hours of work left before I would run out. When I did the Update SETI responded that it had updated my Preferences.

I did not connect again until Monday the 3rd of April and at that time BOINC requested work only from Einstein and I got 2.3 days.

Today is Tuesday the 4th of April and when I connected BOINC made no requests for work and just upload the results. I have aproximately 1.8 days of Einstein work and 1.3 days of SETI work left to do. According to what the Posts say and what is in the WIKI explanation BOINC should have requested work for both SETI and Einstein to bring my work units up to 2.5 days for each. It appears that BOINC does not work the way people think it should.

So the question is, how do you keep the work buffer filled with enough work to cover the the time between connects?

At the end of the month I am going to be away for 6 days and it would be nice if there was away to crank up the buffer quantity to cover this period. The old SETIQUE program I used before was great for this. I could increase and decrease the the amount of work in the Buffer any time I wanted and I did it regularly increasing when I was away then turning it back down when I returned.

I have never missed a workunit completion deadline yet on this computer and I don't think I have even come close on a date.

Paul

The work cache setting is "total" work, not per project. The work scheduler decides what to run and when based upon a formula using your resource share and connect to setting.

Before you leave set it to 8 days and update.

It's pretty simple after you learn to relax and trust that the work scheduler will balance you project per your requested amounts, and you don't have to babysit it. right now you seem nervous about whether it will work and are watching it closely. we all did that. relax, kick back, grab a cold one. It works.

enjoy

tony

I'm back. Well BOINC has been trundling along doing the same as it always had, requesting only work from SETI or Einstein for four or five days at a strech.
I am going away for six days so as suggested in the last e-mail I increased the time between log in to 8 days and did an Update to both Einstein and SETI. I did this two days ago.

As usual BOINC is being anal about requesting work and is only requesting from SETI which right now is returning "no work from project" messages. Yesterday Boinc actually ran out of work and had been idle for about an hour when I logged on to the NET. It imeadiately requested work from SETI and when it got the "no work from project" message it actually went out and requested 8 days work from Einstein. Einstein only returned 1 days work for some reason.

Today BOINC is still only requesting work from SETI which is still returning "no work from project" messages most of the time. Twice SETI accepted the request and sent small files totaling 18 hours work even though I was requesting 7 days worth of work. So right now I have about 25 hours of work left before BOINC runs out and this is last I will be on the Net with this computer for 6 days.

I think BOINC needs a provision in it that when a project returns a "no work from project" message it will immeadiately go to the next project and request work and not worry about any averaging of work according to preferences until things settle down and there is ample work from all projects running on the computer.

I'll be back to see what kind of response I get to this problem in 6 days.

Paul

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go to projects page, suspend seti, this should cause other projects to fill the queue. Then unsuspend seti after the new work has been downloaded. Warning, this may give you more work than you can finish on time.