Hello,

I already mentioned this on the Einstein@Home Forum. The project was down for about 5 hours and this downtime caused boinc not to connect for 604800, which is seven long days.

It seems, that after several retries boinc tries to refetch the master scheduler list and when this failes, it immediately sets this penalty. Please note, that I was sleeping during that time, I did not click on any button for fun or other reason, I did not touch the puter.

And I really think, that a penality is much too high. I am okay with half a day, or with no connection until all WUs are crunched or something like that. But seven days might be beyond the report deadline.

It might not be a problem with cobblestone-junkies sitting in front of their computers and watching the CPU cycles the whole day. But this penalaty is a problem for anyone having a large number of machines, sitting on different locations. A few (hopefully not all) will run out of work, and the poor guy has to manually check every machine and has to update e few of them -- if the guy recognizes the problem.

Please, set this penalty to a lower limit, at least for the first refetch of the sheduler list.

I have just gotten an answer on this from David Anderson yesterday, as I saw it back off to 163 hours when I forgot to allow test version 5.4.2 through my firewall for a day!

From email:

The exponential backoff mechanism ramps up to 2 weeks
if network communication is not working
(because of firewall or lack of connection).
In principle this shouldn't matter because everything
gets retried when communication is enabled.

However: exponential backoff is to protect servers.
we shouldn't be using exponential backoff when
we know that the network problems are client-side.
We should just retry every few minutes.
I don't want to make this change now,
but we should eventually do it.

-- David

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I have just gotten an answer on this from David Anderson yesterday, as I saw it back off to 163 hours when I forgot to allow test version 5.4.2 through my firewall for a day!

From email:

The exponential backoff mechanism ramps up to 2 weeks
...

Thanks for the answer, as you can see here there is actually no exponential, but rather an explosional backoff :-) Similar to the Big Bang.

It was trying every few minutes and suddenly 7 days.

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