Since I upgraded to 5.10.7, the switching between projects has stopped working. The manager was stuck on SETI for a day--I suspended SETI manually and got Einstein to start, reenabled SETI, and now the manager won't switch off Einstein. They used to swap back and forth about every 60 minutes with 5.8. What happened? Bug or is this alanned change?

J

It might be worth reading Work Scheduler, which explains how the client decides what projects to run (the actual numbers that BOINC tracks to do this is called the short/long term debts). Things like deadlines, work availability, and checkpoint interval can cause BOINC to run certain projects for longer periods of time. Despite this, BOINC does try to stick to your resource share settings in the long run. My suggestion--don't try to override BOINC's decisions about the project to run--this might actually make things worse instead of better. Instead, try to let it run what it wants and you ought to see things go back to normal after a few days.

Having said that, if your really seeing one project have a 'monopoly' over others, try downloading BoincDV, which will allow you to view and reset project debts.

Another thing, try not to set your workunit cache too large, if you can help it. A cache thats too large will mean BOINC downloads more than it thinks it can handle, even if you do actually complete work on time, because BOINC is very conservative on the way it handles deadlines, and this could easily lead to work scheduling issues. More about the workunit cache can be read at Work Buffer.

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A word of caution: that wiki article is significantly out of date, some parts of it more than others.

The new scheduler behaviour is noticably harder to predict. Seems to work well, though. So, Jonathan - see if it behaves sensibly in the longer term before worrying. If you want to understand the decisions the scheduler is making, turn on the scheduler debug flags.

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