As an example (by no means the worst):-

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=3574303

This Host has been inactive since 3rd Nov. After that date another 64 tasks were sent and it seems that all will only see further action on meeting their deadline.
I have to wait until Jan 4th for a task to meet it's Report Deadline to validate a task I completed on 8th Nov, and at the foot of the first page someone has to wait until 18th Feb!

My suggestion is that any host that is inactive after 21 days (or even 28 days) should have all the "In Progress" tasks aborted by the Server and each resent to another host. It might be a good idea for an email to be sent to warn that this would happen within so many days, but if it be an anonymous host, no notice would be given. (Mostly problems seem to arise on an anonymous host (as is the one I quote above.)

There may well be reasonable circumstances to account for this case (and others). Changing RAM, Computer "death", long holidays away are 3 possibilities. And I can see no reason why anyone could be upset by the action I propose. Even if the computer is brought back to activity after the host's "outage", it will soon download another cache of tasks as soon as activity returns to life.

It would be very much appreciated if someone, who might be able put this into effect, could make a reply to this idea, to advise on it's feasibility or possibly any alternative(s) to achieve the same end.

Keith

As an example (by no means the worst):-

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/results.php?hostid=3574303

This Host has been inactive since 3rd Nov. After that date another 64 tasks were sent and it seems that all will only see further action on meeting their deadline.
I have to wait until Jan 4th for a task to meet it's Report Deadline to validate a task I completed on 8th Nov, and at the foot of the first page someone has to wait until 18th Feb!

My suggestion is that any host that is inactive after 21 days (or even 28 days) should have all the "In Progress" tasks aborted by the Server and each resent to another host. It might be a good idea for an email to be sent to warn that this would happen within so many days, but if it be an anonymous host, no notice would be given. (Mostly problems seem to arise on an anonymous host (as is the one I quote above.)

There may well be reasonable circumstances to account for this case (and others). Changing RAM, Computer "death", long holidays away are 3 possibilities. And I can see no reason why anyone could be upset by the action I propose. Even if the computer is brought back to activity after the host's "outage", it will soon download another cache of tasks as soon as activity returns to life.

It would be very much appreciated if someone, who might be able put this into effect, could make a reply to this idea, to advise on it's feasibility or possibly any alternative(s) to achieve the same end.

Keith

Hosts that have not finished a task will not report it, and will not contact the server for more work. Basically a computer in this situation will not contact the server at all. There are many ways to have a host in this situation. Cancelling the work for hosts like this would mean that people that are using a few hours a day of CPU time for SETI will not ever get credit for the work done. A host that consistently does not return work will have its daily quota cut.

Basically, the answer is patience. Eventually you will get your credits.

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BOINC WIKI

I can well understand your frustration, as I am in a similar position, as are many others, no doubt. It seems to me, that this sort of thing is down to how the preferences are set - there is hardly any point in someone maintaining sufficient WUs for an additional 7 days, on any machine which is used perhaps twice a week for a couple of hours at a time! That, however, is something that the host user can change - maybe there needs to be a more 'intelligent' way to control how much additional work can be downloaded. Alternatively, perhaps it should be a fixed amount, of say, 1 day - this would cause no problems to machines that are frequently connected and 'crunching', or to those that are the reverse, and has the advantage that inactive hosts would not get additional work and the amount of work that has to be 're-assigned' would be much smaller.

My own PC is quite modest (read, obsolete) but that was not the case when I put it together 3 or 4 years ago, but it does everything that I need it to do. I had a couple of problems related to over-heating recently (P4 Prescotts and heat, do not mix well), so I set SETI to not receive additional work, aborted the WUs at a very early stage and got things sorted out (marginal Arctic Freezer 4 HSF, then followed by a broken HSF mount). Yep, once I'd got it all fixed, set SETI to accept new work and new work was downloaded, no problem.

7 days of additional work is relative to the host, including the fraction of time that BOINC is on, the fraction of that the tasks are allowed to run, and the fraction of that of the CPU that the tasks actually get. 7 days extra when the host is only on for a couple of hours a week would amount to a couple hours of CPU time.

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BOINC WIKI