First, I want to make sure I'm understanding what I'm seeing. My preference is set to keep enough work on hand for .1 days. I believe this is the default. This translates to 2.4 hours. Does that mean it will download enough units to do 2.4 hours worth of work? For me, that would be about 3 units. Is this a safe assumption?

Now, I would like to keep more units on hand to crunch in case of an outage. But, I want to be sure of a few things first. If I set it for 4 days, does that mean it will not upload the finished results until 4 days or will it send them immediately and download a new unit to always keep 4 days worth on hand?

Also, will this effect my daily stats? I guess this depends on the answer to above.

Thanks for any responses.

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It depends on the estimated runtime of a work unit, how much it will download.

Some WUs (especially Climate Prediction) are estimated way too low so you might receive more than calculated.

Others (LHC) are estimated too high in average as they have a lot of short running ones that are still estimated with the maximum runtime, so you would get less work than you actually wanted to allow.

For Seti your calculations should work.
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If you allow the client to connect all the time, it will upload the work units as they are done, the reporting is a bit delayed. From what I have seen, the report of result 1 is done when result 2 is sent, result 2 is reported when result 3 is sent and so on (I'm not 100% sure about this).

Each reported result _can_ affect your daily stats - but that depends on the validation state. If enough successful results for one work unit are there (3 for Seti), the validator will check and add credits if everything goes well. You will see the granted credits in your stats but not the claimed credits for unvalidated (pending) results.
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When results are done, it will see that not enough results are left for the configured time and will download more work on the next contact with the project. This depends on the uncalculated work units, not on the number of finished / reported results.

The ‘connect to network’ figure is the minimum amount of work to be cached. Basically it works like this: -

If you want to have a minimum 2 day cache of work, set the ‘connect to network’ to 2. Boinc will work out how many work units it can complete in 2 days, then it will download twice your cache size (the maximum figure). When a work unit has finished it will try to ‘Upload’ straight away, when the work unit has uploaded, in the Work tab it will show ‘Ready to report’. When there is only 2 days work left in the cache Boinc will return all the ‘Ready to report’ work units and top up your cache so your computer has 4 days worth of work again.
When the ‘Ready to report’ work units are returned is when Boinc asks Seti for credit for the work your computer has done.

As the Seti work units have to be returned within 14 days the maximum ‘connect to network’figure that should be entered is 7, but even that can cause work units to become out of date if they take longer than usual or your computer is shut off more than normal. Somewhere between 2 and 4 days is a good cache size.

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Anthony