I am on a limit with my broadband so I can only have 40 GB of internet a month. How much internet usage will running several tasks in the background use a day? Is there anyway to find out?
When I go on task manager and look at networking, it says boinc is sending 50 kb a second, which overall would add up quite a bit, although that may not be its actual download amount. Sorry if my question is illegible, unanswerable, incorrect, stupid or all of the above.

Depends on the project or projects you have added and how much work you're telling BOINC to cache for these projects. BOINC by itself alone will use very little.

So which projects did you add, and which applications did you choose to run for those projects?

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Well, Im currently running 8 tasks for 6 projects, I havent made any changes to how much it caches.
Does anyone know relative to how much they do how much they use? As if undertaking many projects at a time uses several gigabytes a month, Im going to have to severely scale back, wheras if it doesnt then no problem.

If you tell us which projects, there's always someone around that can tell how much these tasks are to download and upload.

E.g. Seti has two applications:
1. Seti-Enhanced, downloads 367KB, uploads 22KB per task.
2. Astropulse, downloads 8192KB (8MB), uploads 20KB per task.

There's projects, such as Climateprediction.net that download many megabytes for a model, but then such a model will run multiple days, if not weeks or months.

It really depends on the project, how long the tasks actually run on your computer, if you have a GPGPU (ATI, Nvidia), etc. Without saying which projects you run, we can't make an estimate. Only a wild guess.

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So does the program use internet continually or only in the initial stages?

Is the disk usage section in advanced view (ie primegrid 60 mb)how much has been downloaded or something else? (I dont actually understand computers)

Im currently running (at the moment, ive completed many others) Docking, Primegrid, constellation, Einstein@home, three openmalaria tasks and three world grid tasks. I dont know if thats any help, my main worry is that if I exceed my broadband limit, I'm paying per GB, and I dont really want to do that.

So does the program use internet continually or only in the initial stages?

Whenever BOINC asks for and downloads work, or uploads work. Which, again, depends on your computer speed and what applications do work.

Is the disk usage section in advanced view (ie primegrid 60 mb)how much has been downloaded or something else?

The disk usage section shows how much disk any of the attached projects use, yes.

Im currently running (at the moment, ive completed many others) Docking, Primegrid, constellation, Einstein@home, three openmalaria tasks and three world grid tasks.

Of these, I only know of Einstein that it will have downloaded a lot. But Einstein differs from other projects, as it will have downloaded a lot of work unit files now, and for the next couple of days, if not weeks, it will slice parts off of these work units and do calculations on them. It will not download more work until it's done with these work units. Which is lucky, as those take about 8MB per part of the work unit, and there can easily be 12 parts per WU.

I dont know if thats any help, my main worry is that if I exceed my broadband limit, I'm paying per GB, and I dont really want to do that.

You can set in your BOINC preferences that BOINC can only use X amount of bandwidth in Megabytes per so many days.

You can set this either through the local advanced preferences, if you're using those, or otherwise through the computation preferences of any of the projects you're running. It does require that you run a BOINC 6.10.46 or above.

E.g. http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/prefs.php?subset=global:
Transfer at most --- Mbytes every --- days.

In your case, you can set for instance 30730 Mbytes every 30 days. This tells BOINC it can use only 30 GB bandwidth per 30 days. When it goes over, it will stop downloading, uploading and reporting work until it is allowed another 30GB, or you override with "Allow network always". To run this preferences, you're required to run "based on preferences" for CPU use and network use.

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John, see whether you can look at your account with your internet service provider (eg BT). You may well be able to see a daily and monthly list of exactly how much bandwidth (ie uploads + downloads) you're using. That section of your account may be called something like network usage.

It sounds as if your computer has 8 cores. If you run climateprediction climate models all the time on all 8 cores you will stay well inside your 40GB limit. You'll find that whichever project you get tasks from, the tasks download files before starting and that takes up bandwidth. Then when the tasks have finished they upload the completed files and that takes bandwidth too. While the tasks are running they use no bandwidth ie they're not transferring any data. They're just working on your computer to produce some results/data.

In BOINC Manager in the Transfers window/tab while files are uploading or downloading you see so many kb per second, kbps. That's the speed of transfer, not the amount or quantity of data. It's only the amount ie the size of the files that adds up towards your limit. In the same Transfers tab the size of each file to be transferred will be listed.

Whenever you want you can turn off Network Activity temporarily to give yourself a chance to look at the size of the files to be uploaded before you let them upload.

I don't think you need to worry about how much disk space your tasks from your projects are taking up. If your computer has 8 cores it's probably nice and newish; most new computers have lots and lots of disk space.

If you find that the task files from one particular project look too big for comfort, you can go into the Projects tab of BOINC Manager and set that Project to No New Tasks. That will be the end of that until you decide otherwise.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks for all your replies, I've limited the bandwidth allowed. My main concern was that it was using internet every minute while the projects were going on, but the bandwith limits will rectify any problems.