Preferences

Participants can specify preferences determining and limiting how BOINC uses their computers. Preferences are divided into three groups:

• Work preferences
  • Whether work (computation and network transfer) should be done while the host is being used (i.e. during keyboard and mouse input).
  • Whether work should be done while the computer is being powered by batteries (for laptop users).
  • Whether to wait for user confirmation before making network connections.
  • Minimum and maximum amounts of work to maintain on disk. These values are expressed as time values X and Y. The client will try to ensure it has at least enough work to keep it busy for X days, and at most Y days. If the host is frequently disconnected from the Internet, X should be at least as long as the typical period of disconnection. The larger the difference between X and Y, the less often BOINC will connect to the Internet.
• Disk preferences BOINC's usage of disk space can be limited in one or more of the following ways:
  • Maximum disk space used by BOINC.
  • Maximum percentage of free space used by BOINC.
  • Minimum disk space to keep free.
• Project preferences (one set for each project)
  • Master URL of project
  • Email address
  • Account ID
  • Resource share: if projects contend for resources, the amount allocated to a project is proportional to this number.
  • Whether to show email address on web site
  • Whether project should send emails to user
  • Project-specific preferences

Each participant has a single set of preferences. If you want to have different preferences for different hosts, you must create a separate account.

Propagation of preferences

The BOINC client stores a copy of the preferences. Whenever a host contacts a scheduling server, the request message includes the preferences and their last-modification time. If the server has a more recently modified version of the preferences, it returns these to the client. Thus a change to preferences is eventually propagated to all hosts, and to the databases of all enrolled projects. A participant may edit preferences on the web site of any enrolled project; however, care should be taken to ensure that a change isn't overwritten by an earlier change. The easiest way to do this is to edit preferences only at one web site.