I have one computer that has lots and lots of cpu and gpu tasks but its a slow pc. I would like to take some of those tasks and move them over to my other pc which is (at least) an order of magnitude faster and at present is starving for work.
ps: I am on Linux exclusively, not Windows.
TIA

Cooo!!! - Suse Linux, haven't seen that for years, indeed so long I thought it had died (but obviously not).

It is not possible to transfer tasks between computers.

All your computers are at the server-side limits on the number of tasks they can have (150 for the CPU and 150 for each GPU). That should be enough to carry your GTX1660s through what is meant to be a "typical" Tuesday outage of 3-4 hours. OK I know recently we've had some really long ones getting on towards 24 hours, but hopefully those will be behind u now....
One thing that can help a little is to make sure you have your caches filled very regularly. You can achieve this by setting the "store at least x days" to a mid-range, say 3-4 days; and set the "store up to an additional y" to a small number, much less than 1, say 0.01days. Effectively the store additional figure being so small forces a call for work just about every time tasks are reported.
There are other ways, but I'll leave them up to others to describe.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Hi, Thanks for responding !

Well, my ERB2 (I9-9900k) has 2 1660-ti's and it can do 2200 gpu tasks per day and around 1000 or so cpu tasks per day and it usually maxes out at about 6-800 tasks allotted per day so during an outage i very quickly run out of work on that guy
ERB1 (i7-3960x) with 1 1660-ti, is a bit slower and gets fewer tasks total, but after awhile (less than 24 hours usually) it too runs out
ERB3 is a laptop thats just dog slow, but oh well
ERB4 is an i7-2600k with a GTX 460 and its not real fast but for some reason it gets a ton of work to do
So i was looking to equalize things.
How does this work? How does the server decide how much work each PC can have?
Why does it seem to be so unbalanced in my case?
The Days Work is set the same for each PC "10 days plus 2 more"
I'll try what you said and change the numbers - see if it helps as of now it seems the slower the faster it gets work
Take this info for example :

Today (1/18/2020):                            
            Total   GPU  CPU 
  System     WUs    WUs 
----------------------------
   erb1      129     68   61
   erb2      115      0  115
   erb3      148      0  148
   erb4      297    150  147
----------------------------

1/15/2020:
            Total   GPU  CPU 
  System     WUs    WUs 
----------------------------
   erb1      389    218  171
   erb2      347    232  115
   erb3      198      0  198
   erb4      482    293  189
----------------------------

                              Average Credit per Host (as of today)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        erb1:              67,097  i7-3960X CPU @ 3.6GHz  w/ 1x GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
        erb2:             124,531  i9-9900K CPU @ 4.2GHz  w/ 2x GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
        erb3:               3,250  i7-4510U CPU @ 2.3GHz  w/ (No Usable GPU)
        erb4:              14,090  i7-2600K CPU @ 4.1GHz  w/ 1x GeForce GTX 460 v2
        User Avg Credit:  209,121
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ps: I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed (the laptop(ERB3) is running Leap 15.1 i think) and have been using OpenSuse since before Leap came out, actually for about 10 years or so. I like it ok, I cant find a distro i like better tho.

How does this work? How does the server decide how much work each PC can have?

There are several tings happening within BOINC to control the cache size and rate of re-fill plus hard limits.
The easiest to explain are the hard limits. They are set on the server at 150 tasks for your CPU and 150 for each GPU. There is noting that can be done about these (well, there is, but I'm not sure how it works so I won't attempt to describe it and get it wrong)

Your cache settings aren't doing you any favours, in particular the "store additional" part is way to high to ensure you maintain a full cache. The "Store up to an additional y days" should never be greater than the "store at least" figure, and its title is a bit confusing because it effectively means "try and get work every y days", so set it quite low, I use 0.01 days (which is about 15 minutes), and rarely find that I'm low on work at the start of the weekly outage, but on my best machines (which are currently off-line due to building works) I would be running out of work on the GPUs after 2-3 hours - much the same as yours are.
Given the current hard limits there is little point in having the first figure much higher than 3-4 days. At that level it won't really impact on the number of tasks you can get for your CPUs and it will not affect the work stored for the GPUs as that's a hard limit.

The hard limits there are for a number of reasons including trying to keep the working par of the database to a reasonable size, to limit the impact of a user's computer crashing (in the past there were people who had caches of tens of thousands of tasks that could only return a few hundred before they timed out).

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

It is not possible to transfer tasks between computers.

Sorry but I need to disagree.

Yes there are a way to do change the ENTIRE WU cache from one host to the other, i done that several times inclusive with different OS.

But to do that you need to be an advanced user who really know what you mess. I not recommend to even try if you are not.

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true you can move the entire cache, making BOINC think that computer 2 is computer 1.

but you cannot move a portion of WU to "spread them out". once they are assigned to a host, they are stuck there. you can only process it on that host ID, or abandon it to be redistributed to another host, which will be closer to random and you cannot control where it will go.

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Seti@Home classic workunits: 29,492 CPU time: 134,419 hours

true you can move the entire cache, making BOINC think that computer 2 is computer 1.

That`s is exactly what i mean.

but you cannot move a portion of WU to "spread them out". once they are assigned to a host, they are stuck there. you can only process it on that host ID, or abandon it to be redistributed to another host, which will be closer to random and you cannot control where it will go.

Actually you could do that too. but it a lot harder to control and easier to crash everything.

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Don't forget that the target host computer id is part of the record associated with each task on the server, thus to move a selection of tasks from computer "a" to computer "b" one would have to get appropriate access to the servers to change the task allocation records. Apparently this was put in a long time ago as the direct result of the actions of some individuals who moved tasks between computers so they artificially enhance their scores.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Or move it back from b to a before reporting.

I have one computer that has lots and lots of cpu and gpu tasks but its a slow pc. I would like to take some of those tasks and move them over to my other pc which is (at least) an order of magnitude faster and at present is starving for work.
ps: I am on Linux exclusively, not Windows.

As you will have realised by now, it is possible, but an involevd & [b]huge[b] effort to do, and not trash all the work you've done.

Better to do as Rob suggested, and have more effective cache settings so when there is work (and it's possible to get some of it), it will keep the cache full.
Additional days set to 0.01 or 0.02 is best.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Or move it back from b to a before reporting.

Exactly or you could totally switch all host info (harder to do) .

But as i post was only to show the possibility.

I strongly suggest not to try, is easy to crash all your work and on this days of DB problems that is even worst.

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