4 hour deadlines cause Boinc to go into overdrive messing up other work loads.

4h is strange, which host?

For a bit it was all my hosts. Now it is down to a single task that has a short deadline. I also noticed now that I am looking there were a bunch of tasks aborted by server.

an example task: https://boinc.eternityathome.org/eternity/result.php?resultid=1422833

Thanks for the report, Werinbert, and thanks rebirther for jumping in. Those short deadlines were intentional and temporary. Yesterday evening we were finishing our big campaign, which gives every starting position its first 10,000 tickets, and a few thousand tasks had been sitting in client queues for hours or days. To close the campaign, we re-issued those as copies with a 4-hour deadline and high priority, so BOINC would run them right away. Whichever copy came back first counted. The handful of "aborted by server" tasks are copies that were no longer needed because the other copy had already been returned, so nothing was lost on your side: the task you linked was validated normally. New tasks are back to normal deadlines.