Control the tasks you have

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Gordon Stewart

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Joined: 24 May 09
Posts: 10
New Zealand
Message 91940 - Posted: 26 Jun 2019, 12:22:35 UTC

Ive had BOINC running in the background for along time. Ive upgraded to the new version tonight & its running :) 7.14.2 (x64)


Ive looked through the manager screen but can not find any option/settings for these. I have several queries.

I am currently running only SETI@home tasks

1) How do i control how many tasks I have ? Ive currently got 6 tasks on hand & are processing.

How do i set it to a lower / higher amount ? EG if i only want 4 tasks at any time.. or 8, 10 etc ?

2) Is there a way to hold off uploading/downloading - & do this manually?

Possibly have the BOINC manager "blink" in the task bar - to say there are completed tasks to upload.

3) if i leave the upload/download as automatic. Is there a way to view the logs and show ONLY the upload/download logs - without all the other stuff in the logs.

EG - so i can see that i'm uploading/downloading 1 task a day, 5 tasks, or 20 tasks etc a day
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robsmith
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Joined: 25 May 09
Posts: 1283
United Kingdom
Message 91942 - Posted: 26 Jun 2019, 14:56:45 UTC

Hi - there are a few ways to achieve what you are asking....

1a - You will have to "play" with your cache settings, these easist are accessed from your SETI account home - reduce the number of days cache and the additional days cache from the defaults - it will take some attempts to get it right, and give it at least double the cache size to settle down.

1b - This is different to the cache setting. In the advanced view of the BOINC GUI go to options, then "computing preferences", this will bring up a window with a number of tabs, one of which is "computing", on that tab you will see a line something like "use at most x% of CPUs" - reduce x% from its default of 100% to the fraction percentage that gives you the number of core you want to use (each core in use equates to one task being run concurrently) - for example if you have a four core machine and want to run two tasks at a time set x=50%.

2a - Not very easy, but you can set daily schedules for both computing and network activity using the "computing" and "network activity" tabs (above).
One trick is to setting a start time of 20:00 on day one, and an end time of 08:00 on day two will allow activity between 8pm and 8am, and nothing in between - which can be very useful for those with very expensive day-time power, or very high daytime temperatures....
If you use the "download" size limit it is worth knowing that a "normal" task is just over 700kb in size, and an AstroPulse task is about 7Mb. For both the returned file is somewhere between 20 and 35kb in size.

2b - If you happen to be looking when a task finishes you will see the icon blink for a few seconds. But generally using either the fully automatic, or scheduled automatic will look after things without you having to worry too much.

3 - There are a whole load of logging flags, again accessed via the advanced view options, but this time the "event log options", I think the only ones you want set is "task" (but the transfer one can be useful when looking to see what has come and gone...)


I hope this helps - as you can see there are lots of options, and I've only scraped the surface with the ones that don't need you to manually edit files (which can be a very risky operation)
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Message boards : Questions and problems : Control the tasks you have

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