Hi,

IDEA: An option that would be very nice and important is to be able to set the client (preferably via BOINC online config) not to download any new work before finishing the current work.

REASON: I hereby give you an example machine which goes fool after short period of time:

The machine runs at a 1/3 of day if lucky. It crunches with a "connection interval" set to 1 day. Additionally, the benchmark gives this machine 8h per workunit, while it takes 20h per workunit (dunnow, may be a macos-only problem of some sort).

The machine downloads the workunits, then before finishing the current work it downloads more and more workunits. In two weeks it has work in queue (downloaded) that is already past the deadline. But it crunches it and downloads more and more workunits.

In effect, after 2 weeks of work the machine get's useless as it crunches only the deadlined units.

If machine would be avaible anytime for me, the solution would be to reset the project every week or so. But it makes others loose their work.

But the machine is far away from me and I may visit it quite rarely.

Another solution would be a feature for the client to discard deadlined workunits. But that afair has already been rejected by you :/


PS. Seti@home was a project, that was able to be run in "screensaver mode" without any problems. However there still is such a feature here, it is useless in BOINC with current deadlines and behaviours of other kind.

BOINC project seems to be working well only if the machine is relatively fast and crunches 24h/day. If you set the crunching to "run only when user is idle", you have a great chance that the deadline will waste your work - unless you have a pc that crunches a WU in 1h.

Current "connection interval" feature, that with use of benchmark approximates the amount of WU's to be crunched by client seemingly does not count people who use their machines e.g. quarter a day.

You should consider, that such policy makes computing power wasted and your project slower than it could be.

Use disconnect network service untill the unit is crunched. Put unit on its own settings i.e. home work or school. set it for .01 per day.

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I don't think that any idea has been rejected. And tools to assist in the operation of remote clients are in the basic concept. However, the developers are locked in the dungeon and are only being fed stale bread and poor water until they get the basic infrastructure completed.

The good news is that there is a cross-platform GUI and it is in testing. How long that will take is anyone's guess. But, the key is that it is in the works. When that is finally released we will be ready for the developers to start adding the "nice-to-have" features (well, after they fix the problems we participants make for them). :)

If I have been reading the tea leaves correctly, Rom has snuck some of those new features into the GUI already. But we will have to wait and see if that is correct.

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