I installed BOINC and joined SETI@home 10 days ago. Then on Saturday I joined Rosetta@home too, after I had messed up a bit and crashed 40 SETI tasks in a row. My two remaining tasks for SETI got suspended and BOINC started running 6 rosetta in parallel. I have a 6-core AMD.

Now it's been over 2 days, I'm no longer "blocked" by SETI but still BOINC will give my SETI tasks very little CPU. I had to manually click Update just to get new tasks, but since then they've only been given about 1/6 of the CPU time. Right now I have 4 SETI tasks "Waiting to run" and 6 rosetta tasks Running, and it just downloaded new rosetta tasks for the 4th time today.

Shouldn't it be doing 50% of each?

BOINC 7.0.65 on Linux Mint 14.


- Bjorn

You ran Seti for 10 days and then joined a second project. If the second project has the same resource share value as the first, it'll take several days before BOINC will equalize between the two. Perhaps even as much as 10 days, since that's the amount of time you've given to Seti already.

Had you started Seti and Rosetta at the same time, it would've equalized already. Now, you'll just have to have patience.

I had to manually click Update just to get new tasks,

If BOINC gets work for Seti when you click Update, it would've gotten it itself in due time. As all the rest of the time, when BOINC deems it totally unnecessary to get work for the other project, clicking Update won't get you any.

Therefore, unless you want a crash course in learning the intricacies of the underlying system of how BOINC does fetch work and when it does so, best leave BOINC well alone. Before you have to wait another 10 days. :-)

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I was afraid that was the reason but that doesn't seem like a good way to do it. What if I had been running SETI for a whole year and now decided I wanted to give 50% to another project? It would then be running almost only that for another whole year! My intention was do do 50/50 from now on. I think BOINC should be able to keep a rough track of how much CPU it's given to each project the last day or so and adjust to that.

What if I had been running SETI for a whole year and now decided I wanted to give 50% to another project? It would then be running almost only that for another whole year!

No, it would be shorter than that. Still within 14 days, if I am not mistaken.
As a rule of thumb, it takes about 14 days for BOINC to normalize when you add a project. Doesn't matter how long other projects have already had their run.

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OK that makes more sense. And when I think about it, one day is probably too short a period to average over for many users. I have tweaked the setting a bit to allow SETI tasks a better chance of come CPU: having BOINC wait longer before getting more tasks. And then I'll just leave it running and see what happens.