Does anyone know how long term debt is currently being handled (Boinc v. 7)? I am running this along with SETI (25%) but during the great work shortage it seems I've built up a ton of long term debt to CPDN and SETI runs very little now. Everything I've found about looking up, or erasing the long term debt refers to Version 6 of Boinc.

I know its micromanaging, but it seems "wrong" to let CPDN catch up when it was the project's own work shortage that caused the work shorage.

Luckily BOINC is not our judge and does not apportion praise or blame. It's supposed to be our servant, doing what the people want and their computers need, but as we know the scheduler part of BOINC often acts in mysterious ways so sometimes the only way we can get what we want is by micromanaging it.

I don't think the scheduler has undergone any major redesign between v6 and v7. I'm sure that what you're seeing could have happened in v6 or even v5. If it wasn't for CPDN having (usually) much shorter WUs than SETI the catching-up behaviour might not be quite so obvious for so long.

If you're feeling SETI-starved and the pangs become unbearable you'll just have to occasionally suspend some or all of the climate models to get some relief from the surfeit.

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Actually it changed quite a bit with v7. It no longer uses long term debt. They use the resource share now. It gets a bit complicated to explain here. You might want to head over to the BOINC message boards.

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You are right that there are changes, Mark.

The BOINC 7 Release Notes here say about the Scheduler:

Scheduler changes

The new scheduler observes the resource share setting better than the old scheduler.

Another change is the client will no longer attempt to get work right after completing a job. Instead it will wait until it drops below a threshold and then start asking around for work. You can change both the lower threshold and upper threshold by changing these preference settings:
'Maintain enough tasks to keep busy for at least' (lower threshold)
'... and up to an additional' (upper threshold)

These notes don't explain much detail. There's a more comprehensive description of the v7 scheduler changes in the BOINC FAQs here, in a long section at the end.

The very last paragraph may be relevant to you, Chris:

... you'll find that BOINC will switch between projects and only run these exclusively for a while, before returning to running a mixture of task from different projects. All according to resource share, of course.

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