Downloading Constraints

Hi D'Arcy - Welcome to the E@H project.

It's actually BOINC (and not individual projects) that is in control of exactly when and how the downloading of new tasks is scheduled. You can control this with your preference settings through your account page on the website. By default, your preferences will be set to keep a quite low stock of new work in hand ready for when the currently processing work completes. The default setting is 0.1 days and you could change it to say 0.01 days which would delay the downloading of a new task until about 15 minutes before the current task completed.

However this would have a very minimal (if any) real impact on your volume of downloads. In general, each new task that is downloaded consumes virtually zero bandwidth, unless and until there is a need to change the large data files that already exist on your computer.

When you first registered your computer with the project, you would have been sent around 50MB of data files (possible even double that) along with all the executables and your very first task. Those files contain the data to be crunched for many hundreds of tasks and you would expect (under normal circumstances) not to have to change those files for several weeks of crunching. I've just looked at your series of tasks on the website and the ones that are currently showing in your list (dating back to June 24) all do indeed depend on the same set of large data files so that each new task that you are currently getting is an extremely small set of options that is input to the crunching program to tell it how to process the existing data files you already have. This will only change when all tasks for your current frequency band are exhausted and you need to move to an adjacent band. At that point you may get extra large data files (approx 3MB each) - the number of which depends on how big a frequency change the scheduler decides to give you. These changes usually don't happen very often.

Your best 'control' is to explore the various preference settings available to you on the website and to look at all the local control features available to you through BOINC Manager - use the advanced view and check out the various dropdown menues.

Asking this question means you haven't explored the various options available through BOINC Manager :-). On the projects tab, just select the project of interest and set 'No New Tasks' and that's exactly what BOINC will do until you 'Allow' tasks again. The wording on the button to click tells you exactly what the button will do. The wording changes after you click it. If you hover the mouse you will get a more detailed explanation of the purpose of a particular button.

After you've had a good play, feel free to ask any further questions. Most of it is fairly self explanatory - just be careful with any functions that say 'abort' or 'reset', etc. There is lots of good information about the finer workings of BOINC over on the BOINC message boards.