I downloaded the program last night and set it up with no problems, but it has been downloading work from the server for several hours. Is that normal?

Hi Chris,

Welcome to the BOINC forums.
What you ask is a project specific question, and these are best asked at the project forums and answered there by other volunteers with more experience, or if willing, project people. We are not the Seti forums, those you can find at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_help_desk.php.

Answering your question, no it's not normal. However, this is the Seti project, where 3 to 5 people work part-time trying to keep a project up that's got thousands of users. They have to do this through a 100Mbit connection, which is normally speedy enough to feed all hungry computers out there, but not lately.

This is because the project started sending out Astropulse tasks again, which are big files. Where the normal Multibeam Seti_Enhanced tasks are about 360KB big, the Astropulse are 8MB. Two of these will saturate the 100Mbit connection with ease. They're not sending them out in twos though, but in tens at a time.

This slows everything else that's being downloaded by our BOINCs down to a crawl. So work will be coming in, just very slowly, and with lots of retries and Transient HTTP Errors.

If you want to know the ins and outs of that, or get a better prognosis on when this is going to be fixed, by all means ask at the Seti forums.

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I downloaded the program last night and set it up with no problems, but it has been downloading work from the server for several hours. Is that normal?

Unfortunately, yes. SETI has many, many users already, and they are all, always, trying to download work over an inadequately-sized internet connection.

If you have 'just joined' SETI, you are probably also using a version of BOINC which actually spends much more of its time waiting politely in line, to let other users download work - a strategy designed for a different sort of connection problem completely.

My suggestion would be to join - in addition - one of the many other BOINC projects, so that you can see BOINC working properly while you are waiting for your SETI tasks to download. Einstein is popular among SETI users, because it is well enough resourced to maintain an adequate supply of work. But many other projects, from a variety of scientific disciplines, are listed here - I'm sure you will find one to interest you, even if SETI is your primary choice.

Thanks for the replies. The task is working fin now. Just took some waiting in line time ;)