i dont know if there is a way to FORCE beta's

the best way i know to get them is to keep as few work units on your computer as posible therfore your turnaround time for jobs will be quick therfore when some showup your more likely to get them.

another way(this may lead to idle time) is to choose a project with few work units going out and lots of people trying to get those.. this will mean you are likely to get no work from project (as i said may cause idle time) <<<not recomended but you asked for ideas

personaly i just keep my cache of work units as low as posible and select the project(s) that i feel like running and every now and then i get beta work... i am up to 5 1/2 days completed beta... (when i had longer caches of work units i wasnt geting beta units)

Sorry to take so long to reply, but here is what you wrote:



and this method is totally wrong. You will not get 6 days of Betas. What you will get is (possibly) one (maybe 2) Beta WU and the balance will be other non-Beta WU. When you realize your mistake, the natural tendency will be to abort the (approximately 20-30) non-Beta WU which then makes your system UNreliable and leads you into other problems.

After 21 years of crunching, I think I no longer need to be called a newbie.

While that info may be too late for the round of testing currently running (since the WU's were already sent out), crunchers could assign one of the custom profiles (Work, Home, School) in Device Manager->Device Profiles to DDDT-only, uncheck both the opt-in to new and any available boxes, and any other desired options, then Save it. Don't forget to go to the Beta Testing page and check the box next to the new profile.

Caveat: After creating your Device Profile(s) do not make any changes on the My Projects page ever again, because that page sets ALL of your profiles to the same settings you choose there.

So, then... when you see Kevin announce a new beta test, switch a computer to use your DDDT-only profile, highlight WCG on the Projects tab and click Update, then bump its 'additional work buffer' setting up to 2.5 or 3 days, and wait for the beta WU's to be released. It should continue crunching the WU's from the task(s) you had selected previously. i.e. it won't really waste much crunching time sitting there doing nothing, but it will keep checking for DDDT WU's until it gets some beta WUs... leaving it on that profile all the time would create extra traffic (requests for work) at pseudo-random times (see next paragraph), so that would probably not be a 'good thing'.

I haven't plotted it out or anything, but generally it looks to me like it checks, then waits a couple minutes, then about 5 minutes, then about 9 minutes, then about 11, then 15, then 20, then 30, then it might wait a few hours (possibly, THAT interval is tied to the 'Connect about every x.xxx days' time on the 'network usage' tab in Preferences; I certainly have never seen any OTHER connection interval that is actually tied to that setting) before it starts over checking every couple minutes and incrementing up - apparently the same algorithim it uses to retry uploads when the server is busy.

Doesn't matter. The described system still is correct, as far as it's "huge" beta batches we talk about. With the huge batches it is possible to scoop up days worth of tasks. It was not a hold-by-hand walkthrough, but it could be deduced that it is interesting to increase the buffer in steps of 2 days until other tasks are coming in. At that moment, it could be deduced, it is best to stop increasing the buffer, and set the buffer back to minimum instead. When most of the beta's are crunched, repeat.

With the more recent small batches, starting at about the time of my post you refer to, the dynamics are totally different. There the best way is to let Boinc contact WCG just as often as possible. In my opinion that is done by selecting 1 project only when there's rumour of a new beta batch starting up, being the project with the shortest tasks, and at the same time keeping the buffer as small as possible. When "feeling lucky" it might still help to increase the buffer somewhat temporarily as described above.

There was also a recent batch, I seem to remember, that was not dumped in the send queue but trickled through over several days. In that case it was simply a matter of contacting as often as possible using a small buffer and small tasks so Boinc contacts often.

Since beta's get priority, when they appear they will be cruched faster. If and when other tasks appear, they will be crunched after the beta's unless the deadline is getting near. By that time in general the beta batch is already processed. Hence there is no use in aborting these tasks if the start buffer was small to start with.

The way described by gb009761 works too if you are willing to crunch "dry" or if you have other Boinc projects active. That system might still be improved by selecting no project at all, or only ask for new projects.

Good luck with the beta's to all, regardless of the used "system"! There is not 1 system that's perfect for all situations, and I think the above sums up the possibilities pretty well.

The way I've suggested, you wouldn't "technically" be running with just Beta - you'd also select DDD-T (which, just so happens, will have very few/if any WU's available, due to the recent completion of that particular project).