There is a good reason. It is important to note that DHEP WUs are not meant to be completed, they are actually java-based applications that communicate with their servers to submit results and compete with other islands as mentioned to in my post. Commonly WUs will error-out and restart and that's completely normal behaviour.
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Thanks for the tip, I noticed that the work units have a 6 month deadline so I didn't worry about the pace of work.
I did think it was strange that an evolutionary algorithm would have such long deadlines but if the application is constantly communicating with the network it can be much more dynamic.
I suppose each "island" will reach a sort of evolutionary limit and then conclude calculations so that its "genes" can be crossed with other solutions for the next cycle.