Hoping someone can help

I'm sure this question has come up before but I notice my computers are crunching tasks that have a much newer deadline than other work units.

For example my i7 6800K + GTX Titan X are busy crunching work units that have a mid Feb 2019 deadline but looking at all tasks there are many that have a deadline for Dec 2018 ??

Is there a way to force BOINC to always crunch tasks according to deadline date? or should I not be concerned

Thanks in advance

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BOINC processes tasks on a "First-in First-out" basis, and generally does a pretty good job of making sure everything finishes in time - unless we start to mess around and try to force things to happen otherwise and then things start to go wrong.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Trouble starts when you crunch two projects with differing deadlines, for instance one with deadlines of a week and one with deadlines of two weeks. Then the project with the low deadlines will always be done, giving high chance that the longer deadline project will not be run, or not run in time to make all its deadlines.

So best leave well alone.
BOINC projects have redundancy where any work that isn't done by you, due to whatever reason, is sent out to other systems for them to try.

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Thanks for the reply

I just checked the Program Data > BOINC > projects > setiathome.berkeley.edu folder and I can see the work units all have the same modified/ created date of 20/12/2018 but each with varying times of that day. Comparing this list with the BOINC list of currently active tasks I can also see it is working on those units with the oldest timestamp. So, as you say, the units are being processed in modified date & time order... oldest first.

Thank you for the clarity I hope this thread helps someone else who may be pondering over the question

There is of course a simple way to force the older deadlines to be processed first and that is to check the 'No New Tasks' button and 'Suspend' all the newer deadline tasks just leaving the older tasks to process. Once BOINC runs out of the older tasks just reverse those two choices and off it goes again... unfortunately it will still look at the oldest modified date of the remaining tasks to choose which to process next which, more often than not seems to be quite different from the deadline date.

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