On Fri, 06 May 2005 16:20:04 GMT, "BrianW" <brian@nospam.net> wrote:

Martin 53N 1W wrote:

BrianW wrote:

<snip>

They're back now. Problem posted elsewhere. However what annoys me
is that after an extended outage, BOINC may have decided to defer
communication with [...] So why do they defer communication for
progressively longer times?

It's called exponential back-off. The idea is that it avoids giving
the server a Denial-Of-Service attack as more and more clients time
out and try to 'phone home'.

I take your point, but they could put some upper limit on it. Many PCs 
running BOINC are unattended - e.g. servers - and don't have a user logged 
in to "give it a kick".

Brian

The idea was, and is, that if you still can't connect as the time gets
longer and longer then something is wrong and trying more often won't
help. If you can't connect and you are only trying say once every 5
hours then what si the point of trying again in 5 hours? The problem
YOU, and I, are not the only users trying to connect. So if you and I
cannot connect the theory is that neither can any of the other hundred
thousand users. So if EVERYONE had a time limit of 5 hours then the
system would again be hammered as soon as eveyone got to that limit.
Sooo the system keeps increasing the time until you can connect. Again
the idea being that eventually the problem will be fixed and with the
spreading out of the connections, Berkeley won't get too hammered when
it does work again.