Load balancer on FSRS

Im using FSRS and really miss the load balancer wich no longer works as an addon…
I activated the load balancer in the FSRS helper, but it only work when reschedulling cards. Since most of my cards are reviews, I still have a huge difference in work load every day.

OpenAI recommended to add this to the configuration of the FSRS:
“load_balance”: true,
“load_balance_range”: 3,
“load_reviews”: true
I tried, but it’s not working…

Does anyone know how to make the load balancer work on reviews?
Would be very grateful!!

Load Balance in the FSRS Helper add-on works great – even if you only run it once in a while. Every month or 2 when I check on my optimization, I run “Reschedule all” through the add-on, and it rebalances everything. After that, it takes a good long while for things to get far out of balance.

I don’t understand what you mean by the reasoning “since most of my cards are reviews …” That’s not really a factor in Load Balance. It only works on Review cards, because FSRS doesn’t touch cards in Learn/Relearn.

In my experience, all of the AI chat-bots are pretty stupid when it comes to Anki, so be wary of any advice they give. I’m not sure where it’s suggesting to add that, and I don’t think the ones after the first one are real settings.

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Thank you!
Is it “safe” to reschedule all cards? Wont that mess up the algorithm?

In the FSRS context, “reschedule” essentially means “process the card’s review history according to the current parameters to determine the card’s current memory state (Difficulty, Stability, and Retrievability values), and set a new due date based on desired retention.” So, it is the opposite of messing up the algorithm – it is applying the algorithm to the card. [The caveat is that with Load Balance enabled, you are telling FSRS to stray a little bit from optimal due dates to improve your quality of life. But it will do that in the smartest way possible.]

The only users who should hesitate about rescheduling are users who are turning FSRS on for the first time, and have a lot of active cards that are scheduled with the original SM-2 algorithm. It’s a pretty drastic shift, and can instantly result in a big backlog of overdue cards.

But if you’ve been using FSRS for long enough that most of your active cards have already been seen by the algorithm during a study session, and you haven’t made any big changes to your FSRS configuration (new parameters, changed desired retention, etc.) there’s nothing to worry about.

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Okay, thank you so much! Really helpful :smile:

But if you’ve been using FSRS for long enough that most of your active cards have already been seen by the algorithm during a study session, and you haven’t made any big changes to your FSRS configuration (new parameters, changed desired retention, etc.) there’s nothing to worry about.

For reasons that I don’t fully understand myself, one can end up with a big backlog after using “Reschedule cards on change” (or Helper add-on rescheduling functions) even after using FSRS for a while.

The load balancing of FSRs does not interfere with the algorithm because it uses Anki’s fuzz. When the algorithm was developed, I reinforced this request.

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That’s a very good point, and happened to me! Which is why I intended to mention, but forgot –

@ape If you don’t like the outcome of a reschedule, rolling it back is as simple as Edit > Undo. Then you can regroup and figure out what happened.

I have a vocab deck with almost ten thousand active cards, so at least for me rescheduling will result in thousands of reviews, since a huge chunk of them have never been seen by fsrs. I guess my retention has also been relatively low, and enforcing it a bit higher instantly makes many of them due.

Wait for some time, we will have native load balancer in next version (probably 24.10) and that won’t require rescheduling. It will just run in background.

I’m not sure if you can really call the new fuzz Load Balancer. I mean, it was called that in the PR, but they behave in very different ways.

Add-on: requires rescheduling
Native: works “on the fly”, after each review

Add-on: changes due dates of several cards
Native: only changes the due date of the card that you are reviewing right now

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It was my idea first not to call it load balancer so…