BOINC provides a mechanism to decompress files downloaded from the servers. This mechanism is available in the 5.4 BOINC clients and higher. We have started to send out the files for BOINC using this compression.

If you look in the transfer tab of the BOINC manager while a file is being downloaded, then you will still see the uncompressed file size being reported. This is because the BOINC agent reports the size of the uncompressed file as it will be stored on your local computer. If you watch carefully however, you will see that the reported transfer rate is higher then you would normally be able to achieve. This is because the file has been compressed in transit but BOINC is measuring bytes transfered after the file has been uncompressed.

We are compressing all of the files downloaded for BOINC except for the image files used by the new simple user interface.

Users of the BOINC 5.2 client will not be affected by this change in anyway. However, their files will not be compressed during transfer as the 5.2 client does not have the ability to decompress the files.