So I was checking in on Boinc just now and was excited to see a WU approaching completion. 97%, 98%, 99%, 99.861% and then it shut down to switch over to a climateprediction WU.

It would have been more efficient if that WU finished before switching over rather than unloading, loading the other client, and then loading back up to finish that extra 0.1%. no?

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Not really. BOINC doesn't know how much longer the last 0.1% takes. For example, on CPDN it can take days, if not weeks. Other projects out there even go past 100% (yes, it happens), so how do you expect BOINC to react then?

It would probably be easy if BOINC only ran one project with tasks that all run for the same time. It becomes more difficult when you run multiple projects each with their own tasks, each with their own run-time.

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There was some logic added to BOINC to make sure it finishes a checkpoint before going to the next project as there was an issue if you did not use the keep in memory you often lost seconds / minutes of work when the project restarted. As Ageless stated, that .1% could take hours, depending on the project (as you already know with Climate project). There could be more logic added to check timing, but then it would slow down processing to keep checking that.

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My movie https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/502242

This subjets has been brought up on the dev list many time. Unfortunately there is no way for Boinc to know how much work there is left to do. The best that can be done is what Boinc now does, to wait for the next checkpoint to switch so no crunching is wasted. I've seen WU paused with 100% showing. Some projects have a long cleanup process to go through before the results can be uploaded. Currently I have a Seti WU that has been sitting at 3:01 min for the last 4 days. These things happen when you run 15 projects with some with a much higher resource share.

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

[…] I've seen WU paused with 100% showing. Some projects have a long cleanup process to go through before the results can be uploaded. […]

Or take MilkyWay@home—at least some versions of the astronomy app; the project is under development—where a (short) post-processing stage would start a new count, after the main part of the task had reached 100%. Then there’s SDG, where a “one line” WU will show 0% until it jumps to 100% on completion … Any assumptions BOINC might make about the time remaining are likely to be wrong on some ‘exceptional’ project or other.

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[…] I've seen WU paused with 100% showing. Some projects have a long cleanup process to go through before the results can be uploaded. […]

Or take MilkyWay@home—at least some versions of the astronomy app; the project is under development—where a (short) post-processing stage would start a new count, after the main part of the task had reached 100%. Then there’s SDG, where a “one line” WU will show 0% until it jumps to 100% on completion … Any assumptions BOINC might make about the time remaining are likely to be wrong on some ‘exceptional’ project or other.

There was one project that for a while would count up to 100% and kept going and going and going. I believe the typical end point was around 2400%, and take days doing it.

Actually CPDN only takes a few hours to a few days for the last 01%.

There is a project that currently counts to 15% or so and terminates. There is another that regularly counted to 114%. No amount of arguing with the administrator ever got that straightned out (I have quite processing for that project for other reasons, and no, I won't discuss why on the boards).

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BOINC WIKI