On the work preferences page, the connect to network every X days option acts as a percentage slider rather than a normal number slider.



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Google Chrome 83.0.4103.116 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable)

The original poster noted that there is a percent sign at "connect to network every x days". This is still the case (almost 6 months later), and is very confusing! Perhaps it was not clear why this is more than trivial problem (?). Let me explain...

The percent sign is obviously wrong. But worse, it runs in the wrong directions, so to speak -- increasing the number has the opposite effect than you would expect. I always assumed that I increase the percent, I increase the number of network connections, or the length of the connections, or how often my client connects -- in any case, I expected it would simply tell BOINC to keep more up to date.
Instead, increasing the preference increases the number of days of work downloaded into the work buffer!

More precisely: The number I enter there is translated into the "work_buf_min_days" field in global_prefs.xml (took me a while to find that out, by the way).

So, there are two problems here: First, and most urgently -- the correct unit is not "percent" but "days".

But further, the name of the preference is misleading too!

It would be better to call it the same thing the BOINC wiki calls it: "Store at least N days of work".
If you want to be consistent with the next preference ("additional work" ) you could instead call it "Maintain enough work for at least N days"or something like that.
In any case, the current name implies that this has to do with network connections (i.e. uploads and downloads), which is misleading (at best) -- note that the BOINC wiki calls this a "work preference" and not a "network preference".

I write because I had a lot of jobs were not finishing before their deadlines. When I tried to figure this out, I saw that my client was downloading a lot more work than it could finish in time, despite my "additional work" preference being very small, but couldn't see why changing "additional work" didn't fix the problem.
Eventually I figured out that the problem was this preference.

Before posting a bug report I searched to see if anyone else had mentioned this and found this thread which seemed to me to be dormant. Hope it is OK to report this here.

I see meanwhile that the percent sign has been replaced by "days". This is a very minimal fix, but it is a fix -- thank you!

I think the name of the preference is still misleading, for the reasons I wrote 2 days ago, but this is now something we can agree to disagree about.

In other words, this is no longer a "bug report" -- the "bug" is gone.

Thanks again!