"Finish active tasks and quit" feature

[AufarZakiev]

Describe the problem

Hi, thanks for your exceptional work on the project!

Context:
I keep BOINC running only at night when no job is done on the PC. When I come back to work, I want to turn off BOINC to take back resources.

Env:
Windows, x64

Problem:
There are always a dozen of unfinished tasks in the morning. Some of them could be processed for 7-8 hours by this moment. So, I want these "nearly done" tasks to be completed and no new tasks to be assigned to the queue. After finishing "nearly done" tasks, BOINC should quit automatically.

Describe the solution you'd like

Solution:
Add a tray menu item called "Finish active tasks and quit". It will take a list of already active tasks (with progress > 0), wait them to complete. During this, this mode also will block adding new tasks to a queue. When where is no active tasks, BOINC should quit.

Additional context

The thing to consider: is it a problem for anyone except me? Dunno :)

Well, solution feels pretty natural for me since we already have snooze options in tray menu. I have already implemented it and it works well. I also added translation for Russian language. I will create PR soon

[AenBleidd]

@AufarZakiev, thank you for your report.
The idea of BOINC is a little bit different (start and forget), and we want to keep it simple for the majority of users.
However, there is a way to achieve exactly what you are looking for.
First, you need to add this option to your cc_config.xml file:

<exit_when_idle>1</exit_when_idle>

(check more information here).
Don't forget to restart your BOINC client to pick up a new configuration.
Next, before you go to bed, you can select all projects and set them to 'No new tasks'.
And if there are no big long-running tasks, at the morning you will get exactly what you want.

From the other hand, why do you really care about this?
Just set the setting to calculate during the selected hours or only when the device is idle, and let the BOINC client handle all the other work for you.
No need to overcomplicate your life ;)

[AufarZakiev]

Got it, thanks!

Will keep link to my fork with this functionality for everyone who is interested: https://github.com/AufarZakiev/boinc/tree/feature/finish-active-and-quit

It is a bit different from your approach. "No new tasks" in the very beginning of the night makes BOINC stop crunching in the middle of the night if tasks were too easy to perform. That happens with GPU tasks when RTX 4090 is on.

I see your point and thanks for fast response!

[davidpanderson]

A couple of things:

• after setting <exit_when_idle/> in the config file, you don't need to restart the client (doing so would lose the work of non-checkpointed jobs); you can just do 'reread config files' in the Manager.
• If exit_when_idle is set, and the client has had work, it shouldn't request more. I'll make this change.