Hello rohil,
Except for Genome Comparison, which has many potential check points and saves every 10 minutes, most projects save whenever they reach a point in the code where a small check point file can preserve the state of the program. This usually happens less often than we would like: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=11332

Lawrence

Halfcard,

the subject is also discussed in the post Lawrence' linked to. There is no telling except for GC which is not 'attempt' dependent with none deterministic computation being involved. CPU speed has hi impact on duration and checkpoint spread. Best to know is getting BOINC + BOINCview, except it wont run phase 1 HCMD. Logs the duration of jobs and can record the space of checkpoints and predicts running Time To Completion.

Far as i can see, on my C2D the spreads are around 20-30 minutes. I have BOINC set to wait with writing 999 seconds minimum (17 minutes), where the default is 60 seconds. I.A.W, if there is a checkpoint to save, BOINC allows the checkpoint to be written to disk after a maximum of 60 seconds. In the case of GC effectively, every 2nd checkpoint is saved on my machines (20 minutes).

Sekerob