Hi all,

I set my preference:

Computer is connected to the Internet about every: 10 days.

But recently, the Boinc (5.8.16) didn't download any WU even the available WUs in my computer are running out.
Try to update, but still won't download any WU. Only download WU after Boinc finished crunching the last WU.

Server status page shows everything fine.

This happened for the second time now. Any idea why?
Thanks.

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Hi all,

I set my preference:

Computer is connected to the Internet about every: 10 days.

But recently, the Boinc (5.8.16) didn't download any WU even the available WUs in my computer are running out.
Try to update, but still won't download any WU. Only download WU after Boinc finished crunching the last WU.

Server status page shows everything fine.

This happened for the second time now. Any idea why?
Thanks.

Yes. Reduce your Connect time to a more reasonable 2 or 3 days. You have probable pushed Boinc into a permanent EDF (earliest deadline first) mode. Boinc wont fetch new work from a project in EDF mode until the cache is nearly empty. The algorithm to calculate whether WU can be returned in time includes subtracting the connect time from the due date. So the larger the connect time parameter the less time Boinc thinks it has to do the work.

You have discovered the reason that using a very large cache is counterproductive. The new version of Boinc has a new parameter to top up the cache independant of the connect time. This will probably introduce a whole new set a problems since people are likely to abuse that setting also.

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Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

The General preferences have been updated under your account. Go look and read them over, you might want to make some changes.

The connect to every so many days is now better to set at 0 if you are always connected. The next option, keep how many days of work is the option you may want to put at a few days.

Things are always being updated, so it is best to check your online preferences first.

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The reason why I set to 10 days so that I could have spares of WU to process. And so far, my computers never missed the deadline. Although in reality I connect to the Internet almost every day with a dial-up.
Even with 10 days setting, last time when the big outage happened and no WU for almost 2 weeks, I was out of WUs and have to wait for almost 2 weeks as well.

And yes, I think I saw this "Using Earliest Deadline First" in my Boinc messages tab and never know what it means.

Anyway, will try the setting to 5 days.

Thanks for the information guys.

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The reason why I set to 10 days so that I could have spares of WU to process. And so far, my computers never missed the deadline. Although in reality I connect to the Internet almost every day with a dial-up.
Even with 10 days setting, last time when the big outage happened and no WU for almost 2 weeks, I was out of WUs and have to wait for almost 2 weeks as well.

And yes, I think I saw this "Using Earliest Deadline First" in my Boinc messages tab and never know what it means.

Anyway, will try the setting to 5 days.

Thanks for the information guys.

Some of the deadlines are 4 days. If you get one of those, then anything over 2 days for connect every X is guaranteed to drive the client into EDF.

Suggestion: Use 5.10.7 (or later) and set Connect Every X to 1 (which is your typical connect interval) or 1.5 (to give yourself a bit of leeway on the connect time), and set extra work to a few days (10 days is still too much - you might get a full queue of 10 days worth of 4 day deadline work).

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