Running, High Priority

[artemis8]

I've never noticed this before, but now a bunch of my WCG wus their status is Running, High Priority. They are pushing out all my other projects to not run, so that they can run. I like WCG and all, but I don't want all my cores on it. Is this normal, or most likely a temporary things? Thanks!

[zombie67]

I've never noticed this before, but now a bunch of my WCG wus their status is Running, High Priority. They are pushing out all my other projects to not run, so that they can run. I like WCG and all, but I don't want all my cores on it. Is this normal, or most likely a temporary things? Thanks!

This is normal behavior, when BOINC thinks there is risk to returning tasks in time. Resource share does not mean assigning cores. For example, on a quad core, you may have two projects, set to 25 for project A and 75 for Project B. It does not mean one core gets A, and the other three cores get B. It may decide to run all four cores on A for a while, and then switch to all four on B for a while. But over time, long term, it should average 25% for A, and 75% for B. For the short term, the priority is to return tasks on time, that are already downloaded.

[Slicker]

BOINC may get it right some or even most of the time, but certainly not all of the time. I have see it run mini_collatz apps which take 5 hours on a CPU get kicked into high priority even though the deadline is 5 days away and the WUs are 50% done. That's just bad math.

If you don't want BOINC to switch projects for you, stick to one project at a time.

Or, choose two projects and set the resource of one of them at 0 which (if BOINC isn't broke again) should run it only if the other project is down or out of work.

Unfortunately, with the second scenario, the backup project won't get just one WU per core if the primary project is unavailablebut will rather fill the entire cache with WUs from the backup project. After the primary project is back online, the backup will often continue to run for quite some time - unless you have your cache size set very, very low. That sure isn't my definition of a backup project. Recent changes in how it caches work in the 7.x.x clients has confused things even more as the cache settings don't work the same way they used to work.

[artemis8]

yeah these 'high priority' ones have a deadline of 2/22. Plenty of time, if you ask me. Some in the same project are due before then, even some due on 2/17. Oh well. Thanks for the tips guys.