Dear BOINC community,

I am trying to run 1 WU of several projects on my brand new server. E.g. I always want to have 1 LHC WU and 1 Universe WU running, but with more projects - CPU only.

My problem is that the cache runs full at some point so that projects can't download work anymore.

I have set <project_max_concurrent> to 1 in each project.
I tried setting max work and cached work to 0, but the issue persists although I read a comment where Ageless (I think) indicated that BOINC will then always download as much work as necessary to max out the hardware.
--fetch_minimal_work is not what I am looking for as I want to run it constantly

I am trying to avoid --fetch_minimal_work with a client restart every time a WU gets finished, which could be a workaround I suppose. I am alos trying to avoid setting up several virtual boxes for every project I want to crunch.

Is there any possibility to run the same amount of workunits? Or to restrict the number of workunits a project can cache? Or let BOINC ignore that the cache runs full IF a project could run one more task?

Kind Regards, Quez

So it is not possible to run the same number of tasks in several projects, to restrict the number of workunits a project loads, or to ignore the "cache is full" statement if a new task could be run then?

Well, how can I do it automatically? Or which command do I need? I am not worried of idle threads.

In any case, thanks for the response.

I do not believe it can be done with one client, but you could use the --allow_multiple_clients option to setup a client instance for each project you want to run and restrict each client to 1 cpu. In order for multiple clients to work, each client instance needs its own unique data directory and rpc port.

I would probably be possible with a BOINC 6 client, that could eventually run a task per project. The BOINC 7 client runs the cache per project though, with only sometimes (minimal) intermixing, mostly when switching between projects.

The other possibility would probably be to use several VMs with their own BOINC with their own project in them. That way you don't have to do difficult with --allow_multiple_clients and all that.

---

Thank you very much, I will try BOINC 6 . And I messed around with --allow_multiple_clients but it seems the different clients are interfering with each other sometimes, especially when using BAM. Once I disable a project on one client, it becomes disabled on another, too, where it is supposed to run. But maybe I just messed up everything with 10+ clients running.

When you say BOINC 7 is intermixing just when switching between projects, can I just set the "time between switching" to 9999999 or similar? I never fully understood this setting. Or is it just switching tasks within one project?

By intermixing I meant that when your cache runs empty, and gets filled by the next project, that any task now finishing will get replaced by a task from this next project.

While BOINC 6 may be able to do it, it takes time for the debts to equalize, it won't be a quick thing. Also, app_config.xml won't work with BOINC 6.
Any reason why you can't run virtual machines on your server?

---

Dear Ageless,

running 20+ (Windows) VMs produces a massive overhead of CPU and RAM load. I now solved it by running a .cmd script opening enough --allow_multiple_clients clients to run every project.

Thank you all very much for the input!

Kind Regards, Quez