Well, I'm not really interesting in how it figures out what value to set the to completion to except that it does affect other things. Generally, if there's some sort of outage - WCG servers, my DSL service, etc., it typically lasts no more that two days at worst. Thus, I like to keep enough WUs on hand to cover that time so I always have something to crunch. The flip side is that I don't want to have too much so that I end up delaying the quorum or cause a WU to be sent out to an additional user. What I have found over the last 3+ months of using BOINC is that I am regularly tweaking my Connect to server every x days to value anywhere from 1 to 3.5. The sum of the to completion values is used to figure out if I need more work or not. Sometimes those values are higher that they should be, sometimes lower. I know that the to completion values are guesses but the same value is used for all the FAAH WUs and another value for the HPFs. Sometimes they'll change even though no work has been uploaded or downloaded. I've had the to completion values for my FAAH WUs range from around 10 hours to over 25 for each WU. In reality, the FAAH WUs actually take about 8-12 hours typically. Okay, so the to completion values aren't credible. I can live with that but I'd like to be able to set my Connect to server value and leave it, be able to count on having 48 real hours of crunching available but not adversely impact WCG and my fellow crunchers.

Hi Johnny Cool,
The number of units drawn is a function of the profile. The default profile draws enough work units for 0.1 days. You can create a new profile (using Device Manager) to communicate every 2 days, for example. Then the Boinc Manager will draw more units.

My BOINC client normally keeps 2 work units on hand, so that if 1 finishes it has another work unit ready until the 0.1 day communication limit is reached.

Lawrence

aHA!

I'm dense. I knew I had seen this before, but it slipped elusively beyond my grasp.

Anyway: to the point...

There is a command line option for the core client: -return_results_immediately
I'm sure you can guess what it does. :-)

Problem solved. You can revert back to a more sensible "connect to server" value. Of course, this switch should only be used if you have infrequent results to report.

I only find this command listed in the wili as a command line interface, not available in GUI.
http://boinc-wiki.ath.cx/index.php?title=BOIN...ce_-_Command-Line_Options

You can start the core client first, with whatever options you wish. BOINC Manager will then attach to this instance when you start it.