I run R@H on dial-up connection and usually download new WUs each 5 days. Unfortunately, i had to download about 10 Mb of data last time - 1tif, 1r69, 1mkyA, 2reb, 1b72 structures on unstable connection. I suppose there are several reasons to reduce WU size, and this also mean reduced server traffic and workload. There are some ways to do this:
1. WU compression - column grouping, compress text columns e.g with Burrows-Willer -> Huffman, compress float columns with integer convertion-> delta encoding -> Huffman
2. WU distribution - i believe there is no need to receive 5 different proteins for 20 WU.

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WU compression is being worked on now, or at least very seriously discussed, on the BOINC development mailing lists. It's a two-part problem; the support for it has to be in BOINC, then the Rosetta servers have to implement it. Some of it is already there, but I'm not sure what it takes to use it, or if it's only for application downloads and not WU downloads/uploads.

As for distribution, there currently is no way to know if someone is on dial-up or if they're constantly connected but have their "connect-to-every" setting up high because they want a large cache. A couple of proposals have been made to correct this.

So... I don't think Rosetta is any _worse_ than any other BOINC project for dial-up users, but obviously _no_ BOINC project is perfect for dial-up. All I can say is that it is a known concern, and people are working on it.

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