World Community Grid - View Thread - @techs: On mis-estimating the expected runtime of project tasks.

There is an interesting discussion on Primegrid v.v. their SoB tasks (No, the acronym does not mean that ;>). One line by the project developer says this

"It's a long-standing problem with the way BOINC estimates run times, but recently a second algorithm was added to BOINC which works much better. I've enabled this on the server side, but it won't be active on your computer until either you reset or re-attach to PrimeGrid or we release new versions of the apps."

Does not say which client version, or server version is involved [WCG is per log at 701], but suspect you'd need later 7.4.n clients to have the benefit, the WCG 7.2.47 not supporting this.

The question is: Could you enable this for those clients that do benefit the additional runtime estimator?

There's still the unanswered question how one member ended up with 99 tasks per core on the device, when officially there's a limit of 35 [total WCG]. At any rate, mis-estimating, which is easy with OET particularly has serious buffering effects, the larger a minimum cache is set. (Albeit, WCG has essentially broken the caching function, particularly for faster devices... you can hardly go a day away to crunch offline, and find your host(s) idling.

Oh and reading on the answer is given on the estimation experience..."Yes, the estimates are definitely better in 7.4 build after it runs for a bit..."

And more reading at Primegrid gives the developers answer, and may explain why my 7.4 clients usually have 25-30% more 'elapsed' estimated buffer [per BOINCTasks] than the cache setting has been set at, though the answer says differently.

If you have a relatively new BOINC client, you may notice that BOINC suddenly got better at estimating how much longer your PrimeGrid tasks will take to finish. BOINC will now ignore its internal estimate of how long the task should take and will rely only on the elapsed time divided by the percentage completed (i.e., what we always tell you to do if you want a good estimate.) For this to work, you need (I believe) BOINC client 7.3.18 or later. The 7.2.xx clients that many still use do not support this feature. Please note that this only affects the "Remaining (estimated)" display for tasks that have already started. Tasks that have not started are not affected and may still show erroneous (or wildly erroneous) times. It also won't have any affect on BOINC deciding to download too much or too little work because its time estimates are off. Only started tasks are affected by this new feature. (The is the same functionality you can manually set yourself by using the <fraction_done_exact> tag in app_config.xml.)

Well as Will E found out, we need no WCG to benefit on 7.4... simply add a line in the app_config for the relative app, yes at app level, not WCG wide

fraction_done_exact
if set, base estimates of remaining time solely on the fraction done reported by the app. List-add.pngNew in 7.3.13

Off to do just that for OET, no dang it, for MCM and CEP2 too, just to see if this makes a useful difference to the TTC on latter in particular [have doubts :]