Well, my wording wasn't very clear :

After 48hrs, 'most' Results return back to the Server.
This is just an average figure, and there are Results that return in less than 3hrs, as
well as some beyond 48hrs of course.

It's just, that the average possibility to have the Results getting their "Verified" Tag
is increasing, along an increasing delay in return time.

So there's no "hard line", just an average figure of 24-48hrs.

It means that anything beyond that starts to scale down in the possiblity to get fully
accredited to the Database as a contributing Result to the Verified status (which is of
course the thing to aim for).

Going beyond that (e.g. 3-4 days) in case of having no other way to return the Workunits
quicker, simply reduces their chance, but does not render them absolutely useless.

See it as a compromise, based on the User's Priorities :
If he/she wants to score a persistent 100% in getting the Results definitely into the
Database, the 24-48hrs max. will be what to stive for, and consequently to shutdown
anything that is prone to exceed this time.

But if, let's say, a 75-90% are 'good enough' due to circumstances, some might accept this
as a useable compromise between desired ideal case, and limiting factors that work against
it.

And even with those figures, the Administration stated that isolated Workunits actually
never make it back to the Server (for a multitude of reasons). With ~1.2 Million being
sent out per day, the statistical chance is low, but obvious.

Since there's no detailled statistics on that matter, this is all based on the official
Posting several month ago, but I reckon this is a useful estimation.
IMHO, totally pointless are caches approaching or exceeding ~7 days, since the odds of
'scoring a hit' is just getting extremely low.

I hope that explains it a bit better, why there's no 'hard boundary' but rather large
fields of grey that seemingly blend between Ideal case, sub-optimal, undesirable and
totally useless ;)

Greetings
FalconFly

Webmaster
http://www.falconfly.de
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