I try to run this project when I can, but I find their practices so frustrating. My impression is they care more about their results than they do crunchers:
- send wus with an 8 to 24 hr due time which immediately go into high priority bumping all other wu's
- ask for 49 seconds and they send full 1hr+ wus.

I don't mind the average credits or the high end requirements, but my boxes do things besides crunch. And I join in team competitions. I want as much control and flexibility as possible. I just love it when I'm pushing to get some project-x wus crunched on time and they come in and slam me. *abort*

They claim to say they need this quick turnaround time for some mysterious reason. I can't imagine what. Time sensitive projects should not rely on such an infrastructure.

Anyone else fight with this animal?

All projects do that. If you ask for 1 second of work, and all its workunits are longer than 1 second (even if they take a month or two), you get exactly one workunit. Work fetch is rounded *up* to the next full workunit

Some projects generate subsequent WUs based on the results of previous ones, so in order to keep them coming, they need a quick turn-around time. Folding@home does this, for example, though not a BOINC project.

But it seems that they just need the data back for presenting results. It's not that mysterious neither unfair.

However, keep in mind that you have control over the project, not the other way around, by decreasing its priority or even detaching your systems from it.

HTH

Plus the BOINC client has a built in system for ensuring that resource preferences are followed. The client manages current WU's using Short Term Debt, and work fetch using Long Term Debt.

If a project downloads a WU that is instantly in deadline trouble, and then does it again, and again the LTD becomes very negative. Once LTD becomes negative past a point based on other preferences the client stops fetching work for that project, until the LTD returns to an acceptable value. Thus you will find the client doing one or two WU's, for a short deadline project, then not getting any for some time.

But if a project irritates you too much, the best answer may be to disconnect.