About 1h ago my BOINC client (7.4.27) downloaded 2 new SETI@home WUs, which proved to be by far the shortest / least demanding I have ever seen. They also seem to have had a one-week deadline, which for some reason prompted BOINC to get to work on them right away, though I'd think the high priority threshold should be shorter than that.

However, all of that is odd but not necessarily buggy. The bug is that when trying to immediately switch to those newly downloaded units, it seems to have switched to the existing WUs with the shortest deadline first, before those were finished downloading, then switch again. In the logs I have it switching from the ones it was working on at the time that download started to those 2 others 3 seconds after the downloads started, then switch again to those 2 once they both finished downloading. So ended up with 2 more WUs waiting to run with 1 and 24 seconds on them, respectively.

No idea if this is an old bug...

(Odd, I didn't have an account here so far?)

In the logs...

Which are where?
By the way, the latest recommended version is 7.4.36

Also, unless you run with <cpu_sched_debug> and at least 7.4.28, you won't see that tasks run high priority anymore. This because of a change to 7.4.23 that had: Manager: omit ", high priority" from task status. This makes it sound like BOINC is running the job at high OS priority.

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Also, unless you run with <cpu_sched_debug> and at least 7.4.28, you won't see that tasks run high priority anymore. This because of a change to 7.4.23 that had: Manager: omit ", high priority" from task status. This makes it sound like BOINC is running the job at high OS priority.

[RANT]
To me a very annoying change since only a small percentage of users know about OS priority and should know the difference.
[/RANT]

In the logs...

Which are where?
By the way, the latest recommended version is 7.4.36

Also, unless you run with &lt;cpu_sched_debug&gt; and at least 7.4.28, you won't see that tasks run high priority anymore. This because of a change to 7.4.23 that had: Manager: omit ", high priority" from task status. This makes it sound like BOINC is running the job at high OS priority.

Which were open in front of me as I was typing that. Nothing unusual in them otherwise, as in errors or anything, just what I said, switched WUs 3 seconds after starting to download those 2, then switched again, this time actually to them, as it finished downloading them.
And yeah, now that you mentioned it, it didn't say "running - high priority", but seemed obvious what happened. (High OS priority? Come on, if it'd do that the computer would instantly freeze, since it takes 100%. Kind of hard to make that confusion.)
As for the update, was many versions back until last year, then had quite some issues when trying to update, reverted, eventually tried again, but I'm not keen to risk it again now.

In the logs...

Which are where?

Which were open in front of me as I was typing that.

I mean, if you talk about them, why not post them?
They'll probably still be available in the stdoutdae.txt or stdoutdae.old file in your data directory. Logs on their own tell more than you trying to explain what you interpret from them.

If you want to, you can turn on debug switches that show more detail through the Event Log Diagnostic Flags option. The flags and their meaning are explained at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration#Logging_flags. Do know that some can rapidly fill a log, and the log file is by default only 2MB big. This can be increased through the client configuration file's options, if need be.

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Ah, well, still don't see what can be obtained from them now, but there you go, since it just happened again...

17-Jan-2015 02:09:17 [SETI@home] Sending scheduler request: To report completed tasks.
17-Jan-2015 02:09:17 [SETI@home] Reporting 2 completed tasks
17-Jan-2015 02:09:17 [SETI@home] Requesting new tasks for CPU
17-Jan-2015 02:09:21 [SETI@home] Scheduler request completed: got 2 new tasks
17-Jan-2015 02:09:23 [SETI@home] Started download of 01jl12ad.5031.1294.140733193388035.12.90
17-Jan-2015 02:09:23 [SETI@home] Started download of 01jl12ad.5031.1294.140733193388035.12.95
17-Jan-2015 02:09:26 [SETI@home] Starting task 23jn12ac.28035.18235.438086664200.12.184_1
17-Jan-2015 02:09:26 [SETI@home] Starting task 03fe13ae.2554.67.257698037775.12.152_1
17-Jan-2015 02:09:27 [SETI@home] Finished download of 01jl12ad.5031.1294.140733193388035.12.90
17-Jan-2015 02:09:27 [SETI@home] Starting task 01jl12ad.5031.1294.140733193388035.12.90_1
17-Jan-2015 02:09:46 [SETI@home] Finished download of 01jl12ad.5031.1294.140733193388035.12.95
17-Jan-2015 02:09:46 [SETI@home] Starting task 01jl12ad.5031.1294.140733193388035.12.95_0

20-Jan-2015 16:08:25 [SETI@home] update requested by user
20-Jan-2015 16:08:26 [SETI@home] Sending scheduler request: Requested by user.
20-Jan-2015 16:08:26 [SETI@home] Reporting 3 completed tasks
20-Jan-2015 16:08:26 [SETI@home] Requesting new tasks for CPU
20-Jan-2015 16:08:30 [SETI@home] Scheduler request completed: got 3 new tasks
20-Jan-2015 16:08:31 [SETI@home] Starting task 27ja13ag.25864.20926.438086664195.12.46_1
20-Jan-2015 16:08:32 [SETI@home] Started download of 01jl12ad.5031.395923.140733193388035.12.195
20-Jan-2015 16:08:32 [SETI@home] Started download of 05oc12aa.17477.333151.438086664203.12.79.vlar
20-Jan-2015 16:08:36 [SETI@home] Finished download of 01jl12ad.5031.395923.140733193388035.12.195
20-Jan-2015 16:08:36 [SETI@home] Finished download of 05oc12aa.17477.333151.438086664203.12.79.vlar
20-Jan-2015 16:08:36 [SETI@home] Started download of 05oc12aa.17477.333151.438086664203.12.96.vlar
20-Jan-2015 16:08:36 [SETI@home] Starting task 01jl12ad.5031.395923.140733193388035.12.195_3
20-Jan-2015 16:08:38 [SETI@home] Finished download of 05oc12aa.17477.333151.438086664203.12.96.vlar

Just one in this latter case, since just one such short WU was downloaded, and started right after the scheduler request was completed, then paused to switch after 5 sec, when that finished downloading.