Hi,

Can anyone explain how/if resources are allocated when there's no work available for a project, but you're still allocating a certain percentage to it?

In other words, say I'm running 10 projects and assign each 10% of my PC's resources. Then if, say, three projects go down or don't send new work, are their resources available for the remaining projects? If so, how is it divided up?

Thanks,

Mark

100% is the sum of the ressource points of all active projects with workunits

So if 3 projects with equal ressource points are there, each gets 33.33% time shares. Paused projects and projects with no workunits are just ignored for the time distribution.


The projects that would be allowed to download and work, but do not receive workunits, collect long term debits during that time. So when one of those projects has work available, it will download work with higher priority.

It will not have collected short term credits while no work has been available though, so it will not work with a higher priority.

As the other projects collect negative debits while they are active, this sometimes leads to the situation, that a project is supposed to work (because of positive short term debits) but not downloading workunits (caused by negative long term debits).

You can influence the short term debits, they are set to 0.00 when you pause a project. The only ways to influence the long term debits are project reset and detach :-(


Paleantologist report, that this weird behaviour has already been found in very early versions of BOINC, evolution has failed to eliminate one of those two types of debits.

Thanks. I think I understand about the resource allocation, but I'm not sure I get it about the long and short term debits. Is there a good reference to learn more? Does all that have something to do with why I've seen some of my WUs run with a status of "Running, high priority"? I don't see that documented anywhere.

Thanks. I think I understand about the resource allocation, but I'm not sure I get it about the long and short term debits. Is there a good reference to learn more? Does all that have something to do with why I've seen some of my WUs run with a status of "Running, high priority"? I don't see that documented anywhere.

The FAQs
Scroll down to: 04. BOINC Terminology, then click on D (for Debt).

Think the "High Priority" choice of words by Ananas for fetching work from those projects that had not been able to get crunched for a while set off a little confusion. The work fetched still has normal project deadlines and to make up for the LTD will be more than usual to compensate.

A projects LTD increases when it is not doing work if it is also not in communications deferral, suspended, or marked for no new work and has no work on the client.

Projects are contacted from Highest LTD to Lowest LTD if the project is not in communications deferral, suspended, or marked for NNW.

Projects with too low an LTD are not asked for work at all unless the work queue is smaller than specified and none of the higher LTD projects can be contacted for work.

Projects that do not have work for a long time do not have their LTD increased as rapidly as projects that are simply not being asked for one reason of another. This is because a project that is not supplying work will spend at least some time in communications deferral.

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BOINC WIKI

Thanks, a lot, everybody. This is great info.