I understand that for a project with more than 100000 active clients, situations will arise where the servers are the bottleneck, and need to be "protected" from overload. But I have a philosophical problem with restraining the _clients_ when it is the _servers_ that get overloaded. To my mind, if a project cannot afford the hardware to service 100000 clients, then it should not *accept* 100000 clients.
I myself do not run the way an "average" BOINC participant does -- I run off-line. Once a day I connect my client machines to the internet, "squirt" work up and down - and disconnect. If a 'ready' result gets "backed off" instead of being uploaded during this "squirt" -- it has to wait until tomorrow's connection for the upload to be tried again. If that makes the result miss its deadline - TOO BAD - I consider it the fault of the project for not accepting the upload, not my fault for not having the kind of connection that would wait around for the server to get 'ready'. And there are many projects which "throttle" the assignment of work (by enforcing a "minimum interval" between work requests from the same client). Little do these projects realize that my multiple client_machines are ready and willing to perform lots more crunching for them -- but they never see any follow-on requests from me, since I have already disconnected before their "minimum interval" expires. I realize that you have to design for the "average" participant. But as long as BOINC supports specifying an 'interval between connects' of more than 24 hours, I for one will definitely make use of the way-of-doing-work that offers. Please keep in mind the implications -- for any proposal that relies on "backing off" before retrying -- of the possibility of a connection that, rather than going idle, will simply close down (for the next 24 hours, or more). mikus _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
