Is there a way to completely disable switching? In other words, once boinc starts a work unit, or a pair of work units, it won't switch up, it will keep running through those two until they are finished, and only then will it move on to another? The way it works now, so much potential work goes to waste. Any time I don't run BOINC for a while, most of my in-progress work expires. There would be no in-progress work if it wasn't switching. Well, there would be the active work unit(s), but not 10 other partial work units. And I have a netboot image with BOINC installed on it, that I use for "stress testing" machines. This netboot only runs for a day or so, so it almost never returns any results. It keeps switching between all the projects, and once I reboot, everything is gone. (Netboot is read-only).

Set "Switch between' to 500000 minutes. That's about a year.

Any time I set it above 999 minutes, it defaults to 999 minutes. Thats only about 16 2/3 hours.

You could download tasks for only one project (set all others to No New Tasks), then BOINC wouldn't switch at all (at least if you don't crunch on GPUs).

Gruß,
Gundolf
[edit]And set your cache to 0/0 (or 0.04/0.04), so that not so many tasks get downloaded unnecessarily.[/edit]

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

OK but what if I want to do work for a bunch of projects, but I just don't want it to switch? This seems like a pretty basic setting. But what I'm noticing about BOINC is that it really isn't into letting you making big changes, it likes to only let you modify amounts.

Any time I set it above 999 minutes, it defaults to 999 minutes. Thats only about 16 2/3 hours.

There is no upper limit for that setting, only a lower limit (of 0.0001). I've just tested the advanced local preferences with 500000 minutes and it took. From my global_prefs_override.xml file:

<cpu_scheduling_period_minutes>500000.000000</cpu_scheduling_period_minutes>

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Did you set it in the GUI or did you edit the xml file directly? I've tried many times on many machine to set it much higher than 999 minutes, and it always reverts to 999 when you set it higher.

Which version of BOINC are you using?

6.10.21
But I just set it to 50000 and it DID take it. Before I was probably setting it to 99999 or possibly a few more 9s, and that was bouncing down to 999.

You know... I set it to 50000 minutes, and it switches a lot less. But it's still switching. For me it's an annoyance, but for the projects, it means wasted work.

Right, but most of the time I run BOINC, I run it as a stress test for Macs I've fixed. On my own machine, I do not run it religiously. So all these partially done work units either expire, or disappear all together when I reboot (netbooting is read-only, nothing survives a reboot). I've wasted so much work because BOINC decides it will do a little bit of everything, rather than trying to get as many units done as it can.