> More to the point, by simply declaring that he's staying on 6.4.5, Mikus > is no longer helping develop new versions of BOINC, he's hindering it.
It is absolutely correct that I've given up on developing new versions of BOINC. My reason is that BOINC development is no longer helping me in my participation in distributed computing projects. My "big" system is running the 5.10.45 client. Why? Because none of the newer clients fetch as much work as I need. I typically connect once a day, and "squirt" work up/down. I then disconnect until the next day. What happens when I run with a newer client is that I manually wipe out all history, and enough work gets downloaded. But the next day, *less* work gets downloaded than was crunched. And the same thing the day after. Very soon, the new work being downloaded does not add enough to the ready queue to keep the system crunching for 24 hours. I must perform an "unscheduled" download to keep the system from going idle, and have to manually wipe history to restore download volume. [With 5.10.45, what gets downloaded each time is about the same as what got crunched since the last download.] [My guess is that the newer clients are refusing to download work from "overworked" projects that have work available, so as to supply crunching capacity to the "underworked" projects -- which unfortunately happen *not* to have work to do !!] It seems to me that BOINC development in the "work fetch" area is solving server throughput problems for large projects by adding constraints to the clients. I have enough trouble with occasional retrying of transfers -- when they miss a "squirt", they miss a day -- if a result upload misses several "squirts", the workunit may end up missing its deadline. Now BOINC development has come up with "project deferrals" -- I'm fairly sure that's incompatible with how I participate. If BOINC development were willing to provide a way to "opt out" from some of the new "work fetch" constraints, I'd be willing to continue to help. As it is, things which used to work with old versions of BOINC no longer work for me with new versions. mikus p.s. I laugh at one particular project. They limit the amount of work given out at one time, and they set a short deadline. The result: I connect for a "squirt"; a few WUs get downloaded, and immediately go into EDF; no more WUs get downloaded until the next "squirt" - which is tomorrow. If they allowed a larger amount to be downloaded, my system has the capability to crunch them all in less than 24 hours -- but the "supply" policy that project has chosen ends up limiting the very benefit (have-others-do-the-crunching) that distributed computing provides. _______________________________________________ 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.
