What is it?

Online Schedulers Status is the original service of BOS. It was designed as an image which web site owners could place at their web sites, to offer their users a quick overview of BOINC projects - more precisely the online status of the schedulers of these projects.

This has always been a devided service: BOINC users could see if their favorite projects were available for connection attempts, project admins would have less similar questions about "Why can I not connect?", "Why can I not get new work" to answer as well as less congestion when a project gets back up from some type of downtime, and web site owners would get added value to their sites with this user directed information "box" - with no coding needed on their own.

How does it work?

Basically, the BOS server test the project schedulers every 5 minutes, and saves the results in a central database. From here the information becomes available to users in a variaty of ways which is pulled from the BOS server. These ways include the well known image, as shown to the left, but also as XML, and more. You can choose freely from all available ways, and use however suits your needs.

Does BOS add to congestion?

As the schedulers are tested every 5 minutes, some would argue that this would add to congestion. This would be true if this service wasn't used at all, and every one would click update all the time, but that's not the case - and the more the information from this service is actively used, the better it actually gets (in part, at least). Even better the service will get when something called "delayed online status reactivation" is implemented. This will delay the "Online" message a little while after an outage of a project, giving it time to settle before user-initiated connection attemps are made - given these users keep an eye on the output of this service.