In preferences, I normally have the "on" times set between 0700-2200 every day. I was going to be gone overnight, so I used the day-of-week override to reflect that the computer would be on up to a certain time, when I left the house, and would come back on a certain time after I got back. During the time that the computer was not on, three tasks were due. I thought that BOINC would go into high priority mode for those tasks since the "off" time was going to occur in about 3 hours. However, BOINC acted like nothing had changed. I finally lost my nerve and forced them to complete by suspend all other tasks. So, after this rather wordy intro, how does BOINC use the processor usage information?

Thanks,
Jim

The scheduler does not use the information from the schedule, it uses history to try to determine future actions, and then only based on the fractions of time spent off, not the durations.

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BOINC WIKI

The scheduler does not use the information from the schedule, it uses history to try to determine future actions, and then only based on the fractions of time spent off, not the durations.

So currently, that part of preferences not used?

Jim

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Thanks,
Jim

The scheduler does not use the information from the schedule, it uses history to try to determine future actions, and then only based on the fractions of time spent off, not the durations.

So currently, that part of preferences not used?

Jim

It's used but not the way you think it is used.

You think the scheduler can look at it's future schedule of on/off times and decide what it needs to do now to prepare for or cope with future conditions. The scheduler is not that intelligent and I think it need not be that intelligent.

The scheduler looks at deadlines and attempts to meet them. It keeps a record of the percentage of time the computer has been allowed to crunch in the past and it uses that percentage to decide how much work to download.

You are right about how I thought the scheduler worked. I think I understand your explanation and that explanation essentially says that the preferences governing processor usage are not used in the scheduler. That's great, I think the scheduler is a remarkable piece of software. I'm just pursuing this from an academic point of view.

Jim

Any job getting within 24 hours of deadline goes into High Priority, in fact if there is a squeeze it will occur earlier, so not sure for how long you scheduled the machine to be off... > 24 hours?

Not in the current scheduler.

The current scheduler is a bit better than that.

If a task will not finish between now and 90% of the time to report deadline - (Connect every X + task switch interval + safety margin) at the resource fraction of the tasks on hand, it is in danger of being late, and gets the CPU now.

Currently the safety margin is set to 0 (Not my decision).

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BOINC WIKI