Deferring planned system maintenance work to the weekend makes pirfect sense for an enterprise that runs at maximum only five days a week with reduced usage during the weekend. Doing so minimized the impact by affecting only the small number of weekend workers.

With an operation that runs 24/7 with users around the globe, it makes no sense to defer planned work to any specific day. When the work comes up on the schedule and the manpower to do it is available, it makes sense to do it during the staff's regular work day because there is no time of reduced use.

I am trying to work my mind into cloud computing. I think I understand how dedicated server(s) process the projects work. In a cloud infrastructure are there multiple virtual machines spread across a large number of servers. When any given contributor reports a result it goes to any of the allocated servers, which then coordinates storing the results and then downloads the scheduled new work. At the end of 12 hr calculation of results, a collection of servers then tote up the scores.

Is this correct?

+1
Indeed, cloud computing represents a different way to consider and to model the IT infrastructure. However, at the end, we need computers, storage units, networks, etc...
Cloud computing is not a technology but only a (marketing) way to sale existing technology.
After the June outage, I kindly asked for a post-mortem debriefing of the incident; hoping that we (WCG staff as well as the members involved in such IT infrastructure operation on a daily business level) could learn from what did happen.
Now, I add this incident to the list of expected reports.
I do not criticise nor blame IBM for these troubles, since more or less every cloud service provider experiences troubles. Despite the marketing arguments, I tend to consider cloud computing as less reliable than well operated "conventional" IT infrastructures.

Good luck,
Yves

Current WU status and representative error messages

5 Downloading
........4992 World Community Grid 7/18/2017 5:10:42 PM Temporarily failed download ...transient HTTP error
........4993 World Community Grid 7/18/2017 5:10:42 PM Backing off 00:15:57 on download ...
168 Ready to start
18 Running
461 Uploading
........5006 World Community Grid 7/18/2017 10:10:27 PM [error] Error reported by file upload server: can't open file
........5007 World Community Grid 7/18/2017 10:10:27 PM [error] Error reported by file upload server: Server is out of disk space

652 Total WUs

Thanks to all involved in the recovery effort.

My PCs are setup with a few days WU buffer, so short outages are fine - and this should be the same for most people.

But does anyone know how to increase the WU buffer on Android phones? The buffer there is very small and there is no setting to control it in BOINC's preferences. Whenever there's an outage, the phone runs out of WUs between 12 to at most 24 hours later.