There are 2 similar sounding preferences, one is a general BOINC preference and the other is project specific.

1) Computing preferences
Switch between applications every X minutes
(recommended: 60 minutes)

2) Rosetta@home preferences
Resource share
If you participate in multiple BOINC projects, this is the proportion of your resources used by Rosetta@home

What is the difference between these 2 settings?


--Benjamin

I also have a question about how Resource share works. I am not sure if I should post as thread here since is related or start new thread.


--Benjamin

Resource shares are just a means for you to give the BOINC Manager an idea of how you would prefer your machine's time be spent. I believe the default value will be 100 when you first attach to the project. This number is then compared to the resource share for any other projects you are attached to, and BOINC will try to ensure that over time that ratio of computing time is give to the projects you have selected.

Recently they added a new feature to support a resource share of zero. This designates a project that will only request tasks if none are available from your other projects. And so rather then trying to run that project for 10% of the time, and accruing debt to it when it is not running, it just operates as a "stand-by" project for when no work is available from the others for any reason.

An example:

Resource share for Rosetta 100
Resource share for Ralph 100
Resource share for Einstein 100

The total is 300, and then each will have a 33.3% share. But Ralph doesn't have work all of the time and so may be unable to keep CPU running 33.3% of the time. The result can be that the client accrues more and more debt to Ralph and tries increasingly hard to obtain Ralph tasks. It can get to the point that it does not maintain the desired cache of tasks for your other two projects.

So, the following might work better:
Resource share for Rosetta 100
Resource share for Ralph 10
Resource share for Einstein 50

The total is 260. BOINC will attempt to run Rosetta about 40% of the time (100 divided by 260).

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

As to your first question...

Switching between applications refers to how often you would like BOINC to reconsider which application is running, in order to try and enforce your resource share preference. Switching very frequently can waste a considerable amount of resources. And you aren't FORCING a switch at that time interval, you are just asking BOINC to reassess what it is working on. It may decide to continue working on what it was already doing for various reasons. And so this is the difference between the two settings. The switch time defines how often to think about it, and the resource shares give a framework to use to make that decision.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense