As you have found, you can change it to zero, although I usually set it to 0.1. Why should I not be able to set it to zero if I so desire - it leaves the door open for the project to be contacted if the other projects are all offline, but gives a very low rate of LTD accumulation, so I don't suddenly get wu's from the projects I don't want.

I do this all the time on many different BOINC projects.


No. Doing that distributes the share on a percentage basis across all the remaining projects, that is not what I want to do. For this particular event, I wanted all of the share sometimes allocated to wcg to be moved to a single other project.

The "why" I am doing this is not relevent - I choose to operate my systems my way.

I have reset wcg, this seems to have had the desired effect. I now show 500 share, (5%), and it has downloaded another wu.

Indeed so.

You wanted me to run my machine in a different manner - one which would not have acheived my goal.

Patronising. I am quite aware of how the client works. You are assuming I am ignorant.

If I can't set the project to 0.1 share, (so that the client shows it as 0.00%), then I will have to detach to avoid a residual percentage in my display and increasing LTD. That then removes the utility of having the project still there and available to ask for work if all others fail. Being able to set the share to 0.1 or even zero seems a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do.

If you are only running WCG, the resource share can be any reasonable number, which I would suspect to be non-zero. Whatever it is would be equated to 100%. "No new tasks" has the effect of a resource share = 0.

I have set projects to 0.1 or even 0.01 in the past, for projects I wanted to run rarely. It is difficult to guarantee anything with such a small slice of the work, if another one has 99%+. At the moment, everything is set to 10.0 for convenience, and all except WCG have "no new tasks" enabled so they won't get new work. That is a lot easier to manage if you want to control it manually. It is easy to hit the button now marked "Allow new tasks" if I want it to get something. I have been doing that once per year, just to keep everything alive, if they still exist.
(Some don't.)

It is also very easy to hit "No new tasks" for a few days before I go out of town, to drain the queue before turning off the computers.

Note: I am attached to over 50 BOINC projects on one of the computers here.

WCG is the only project running at the moment, so that 10.0 equates to 100%. If two projects were enabled, each one would be 10/(10+10) or 50%.

Juggling the BOINC percentage causes strange problems in the scheduler. New projects always think that they have 100% and fill up the queue regardless of other projects, at least until they update their first workunit.

BOINC Project weight considers WCG as a whole in comparison to other BOINC projects like SETI, not the WCG subprojects like HCC, AC@H, FAAH or HPF2. You can adjust your my grid/my projects to set parameters for the mix of those desired, but multiple projects have equal weight. It is also possible to adjust the project profiles in one of the four device managers (default, home, school, work) if you want certain computers to run certain WCG projects or combined projects.

One of the Russian projects only allows multiples of 10, rather like an ATM. You can only get 10.0, 20.0, ... 100.0. 0.01 or 0.1 is not allowed at all there.

BOINC doesn't handle micro-managing well.

Now, I don't want you to get offended by the term - there is nothing wrong with controlling BOINC in fine detail if you want. BOINC just doesn't respond well to it. BOINC is intended to run completely hands-free. While it fails to quite live up to that standard, it really doesn't respond well to constant adjustment. Even an occasional adjustment can have unexpected effects.

In fact, once you start controlling it manually, you find yourself making more and more fine adjustments to stop it going off and doing what it wants. This is why I don't recommend the manual control approach to anyone.

And (retsof) just one minor correction: new projects request the smallest possible unit of work initially. During that first request, BOINC downloads the preferences and recalculates the percentages based on the new weights.

Can anyone reproduce this zero weight bug? It will help the techs to fix it quickly if we can provide as much information as possible.