Configuration: BOINC 7.4.36, Windows XP, AMD 4 core CPU, nvidia GTS 450S

I have the computer preferences set to store 5 days work and store up to an additional 5 days work. This is to cover the long outages that Seti@home has.

Right not, I have a total of 1.5 days work queued. Every project I see in the event log sending update request is saying

SETI@home | Not requesting tasks: don't need (CPU: not highest priority project; NVIDIA GPU: not highest priority project)

Why aren't more work units being downloaded?

My project list is Cosmology@Home, Einstein@Home, Enigma@Home, LHC@Home, SETI@Home, VirtualLHC@Home. A couple of these have very large numbers of work units available, but BOINC isn't trying to get anything. Why?

Thanks,
++PLS

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Simple, your cache contains other projects that need your CPU/GPU to catch up.

Setting a large cache is usually counter productive. Most project limit how much work units you can have in your cache. In SETI case that is 100/CPU/GPU. Also, projects with short deadline will be forced to be process first since your telling Boinc that you have a minimum 10 day cache.

Be reasonable and set your cache to 2 or 3 and additional 1 day. You will find that things will work much better and Boinc will have an easier to time to follow your resource share setting. It will take Boinc several weeks to adjust to the new setting.

BTW, SETI is currently in a WU drought.

Would a large cache account for such a low total amount of work? The larger the cache you ask for, the less work is actually cached?

Actually, the problem was different.

I has set all projects to no new work a while back so I could shut down the machine while away. When I set the projects back to accept new work, only a small amount was downloaded. Thus this thread.

I just discovered that, somehow, the local settings for work cached both had been set to .1 days. No idea how that happened. I know I didn't do it. When I hit the clear button in Computing Preferences, the settings became 5 and 5 as set in the web interface.

I also discovered that using the web interface to set the cache to 3 and 2 will not be picked up by BOINC until I hit the clear button again. Apparently when the 5,5 setting was picked up it became another local override. The setting to 3,2 was never pick up even after the project it was set on did an update AND after I forced an update several times. Is this the intended behavior? It seems wrong.

I'll run for a while with 3,2 and see what that looks like. I can already see that the task downloaded when the settings was 5,5 are enabling a BOINC behavior that a really strongly dislike. The previous schedule had a strong tendancy with my project list to run one task from each project. The new schedule has a very strong tendancy to run 4 (on a 4 core system) tasks from the same project, thens shift to 4 tasks from a different project. The problem is that Cosmology tasks are very large and my machine can't run 4 at once and still be usable. I much prefer the old behavior.

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I also discovered that using the web interface to set the cache to 3 and 2 will not be picked up by BOINC until I hit the clear button again. Apparently when the 5,5 setting was picked up it became another local override. The setting to 3,2 was never pick up even after the project it was set on did an update AND after I forced an update several times. Is this the intended behavior? It seems wrong.

"Intended" might be a bit wishful, but yes - that's how it's been written to work. If you make any change via the Manager graphical interface, the complete current set of values becomes fossilised in amber and completely overrides the web-based preferences.

Use the web to control BOINC, or use the Manager to control BOINC. Don't even try to mix'n'match.

I now have my cache set to 2 days plus 1 day and the cached workload is pretty much down to that.

I'm now in a situation where my Seti, my highest priority project has no tasks; the Seti server has tasks. Einstein, my lowest priority project, has a large number of tasks cached and continues to download more. When communicating with Seti, BOINC is saying

SETI@home | Not requesting tasks: don't need (CPU: job cache full; NVIDIA GPU: job cache full)

I've wondered whether the cache settings were per project or for all projects in total. It seems to be for all project together. I guess the people who designed the scheduling algorithm didn't know about priority inversion. The scheduler has filled the cache completely with low priority tasks so that there is no room to download high priority ones. This is really ugly.

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