I would like to see BOINC process those work units that are approaching their "sell by" dates first. Would that be too difficult to implement? As yet it has not caused me any problems, but I do get paranoid when I see a bunch of W/Us with a long date and a short dated one in the middle. Probably stems from when I first started on 486s!

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BOINC works on a First In, First Out, unless something is going to miss a deadline then it goes into Earliest Deadline First (EDF). Issue with your way is that with the many, many different projects that can be done on BOINC, it would almost always be in EDF and would your preferences of percentages would not be followed.

You need to remember BOINC runs more than just SETI. You have projects like SETI with different deadlines, Einstein that has a straight 3 week deadline, CPDN that has a 1 year deadline, etc.

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

I would like to see BOINC process those work units that are approaching their "sell by" dates first. Would that be too difficult to implement? As yet it has not caused me any problems, but I do get paranoid when I see a bunch of W/Us with a long date and a short dated one in the middle. Probably stems from when I first started on 486s!

If the Round Robin simulation indicates that a task will finish later than 90% of the time from now to the computation deadline BOINC starts running things in Earliest Deadline First. The Computation deadline is the report deadline - (Connect Every X + task switch interval + safety margin). Safety margin is currently 0, it was 24 hours. BOINC takes into consideration all of the work that is currently on the computer, the project that might download work next, the time stats, and the resource shares of all projects with work on the computer as well as a few other items that I am certain I am leaving out.

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BOINC WIKI