Hi. I'm using boinc with no bugs or technical problems on two Windows 7 machines. I have a request for a feature to be added to a later version though.

It would be really helpful to set priority for completion of tasks either by establishing some rules for the client to follow, or perhaps by assigning tasks manually to different priority bands.

My boinc clients often tend to favour newly downloaded tasks when there are still others to be completed with much sooner deadlines. Manually suspending newer tasks can get around this issue but only if I also temporarily set projects to "no new tasks" otherwise new tasks will be downloaded making it even more difficult to ensure all deadlines are met.


It would be very helpful therefore to have the client prioritise tasks in order of time remaining to deadline minus estimated cpu time remaining. If there is a reason why that would be difficult to implement then perhaps tasks could be selected by the user and marked as high, medium or low priority (where low is the same as the priority given to newly downloaded tasks).

Thanks for taking the time to read this! :)

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Thanks for your quick response. I can't find the settings specific to cache/buffer you mention so that means I will not have changed them from the default.
My computers are on constantly and so running the client for a good 20 hours a day on average, often while I'm working on something that doesn't need a lot of computing resources.

I'm running five projects, the same five on each machine. What tends to happen is the projects with smaller tasks (primaboinca, mindmodelling, acoustics), download a large number of tasks with deadlines less than a week away, complete most of them but then ignore the remaining few focusing on larger tasks from other projects (rosetta, cosmology),with deadlines up to two weeks away while those short deadlines get to within 24 hours. Since there's always a chance of that last 24 hours being a day when I need to suspend boinc to make more demanding use of my machine it doesn't make sense for boinc to leave those tasks outstanding for so long when the tasks it favours have plenty of time to be completed later.