new to einstein, wondering somethingh....

Hi pyro - welcome to the Einstein project

That ratio of resource shares (80:20) should be fine. You can get undesirable side effects if you make the secondary project too low (unless you go all the way to zero - see later).

If your main project is unable to supply work, BOINC will tend to fill your cache with work from your secondary project as if it were the only project. If this were to continue for a while, a very large debt in favour of Seti would build up. When Seti has more work again, E@H will stop supplying work and BOINC will try to crunch Seti because of the debt.

However, as the remaining E@H tasks approach their deadline, BOINC will be forced to go back to allowing E@H tasks to crunch - perhaps in high priority mode. This of course will increase the debt in favour of Seti until the 'at risk' E@H tasks are finished. Then BOINC will continue to favour Seti until the debt is fully repaid. This may take quite a while and many people get disturbed when they see no E@H tasks for all this time - they tend to ask questions, "Why can't I get any more E@H tasks as I've had none for the last couple of weeks?", or something like that.

People tend to blame Einstein, initially for being 'greedy' in the first place, and then for refusing to supply work at a later stage. Of course, the problem is the work availability at Seti and how BOINC tries to cope with it. There is absolutely nothing that the Einstein project can do to prevent the bad behaviour of BOINC. The problem will be made worse if (as is likely) further work outages occur at Seti while BOINC is still trying to recover from previous ones.

Compared to Seti, Einstein very rarely has work supply problems so every time Seti has an outage, it is highly likely that your cache will fill with E@H tasks. There are two parts to the cache - the basic setting and the 'extra days' setting. Is your basic cache 0.25 and do you have something else set for the extra days? Judging by the number of tasks on your various machines, surely you have something larger than 0.25 for your total cache? When you set up a low resource share secondary project, a large cache size can make things very difficult when the main project is Seti - for the reasons outlined earlier.

I think you should consider two possible alternatives. As hinted at earlier, you could consider making Einstein a true 'backup' project by setting its resource share to zero. I trust you are aware of the 'backup project' feature that has been added to BOINC in recent times? This will cause Einstein never to be asked for work while Seti is able to supply. As soon as Seti runs completely dry, your cache will be filled with E@H tasks. As soon as Seti can supply again, requests for E@H tasks will stop and BOINC will eventually cause those on board to be crunched - probably under deadline pressure. It's probably more likely that Seti will have more outages so E@H tasks on board could be quite useful anyway :-).

Your second alternative is to ask yourself why you want Seti to be your main project in the first place? With a very reliable project like Einstein, you get the opportunity to contribute to the search for gravity waves and you also get the chance for your computers to 'find' a pulsar - perhaps even one that is currently completely unknown. Take a look at the bottom two links on the front page under the 'Science Information ...' section. Many contributors here now have their name 'up in lights' for having their host participate in a pulsar re-discovery. There are also candidates for completely new discoveries but these wont be listed until an independent confirmation is eventually made. Just think how good it would be if one of your hosts actually crunched the data that allowed the discovery of a brand new pulsar :-).

You've got a much better chance of finding a new pulsar than ever finding ET :-).

Hopefully, all this will give you something to think about. If you have more questions - please ask and someone will try to answer. Once again, welcome to the project and we hope you enjoy your stay here.