I'm in the process of installing Folding at home, but it seems to be taking forever. My I-5 2600K CPU is maxed out on all four cores and running at 100%. Did anyone else experience this?
Folding at home, a resource hog?
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I reset the upper limit to 85% and it didn't seem to change anything. It's still maxing out my CPU (Xeon E5506) and my graphics performance is horrid. I have to pause folding to even visit ECF 'comfortably'.
I changed my limit to 20% and still see 60% CPU usage when I have anything open. As soon as I close all windows it drops to the level it should be. I was able to finish a rather large WU at the 20% limit right before the deadline. I have another large WU going for my second round and it has a 12 day max limit. My FAH control panel shows it will be done in a shade over 10 days, so it will complete on time even at 20% CPU usage.
Try dropping it down lower and restarting your machine. The change doesn't seem to take effect until you restart, at least it didn't for me.
Try dropping it down lower and restarting your machine. The change doesn't seem to take effect until you restart, at least it didn't for me.
When you change the slider it will not take effect until you close then restart the program.
Folding@home noob here (working on my first unit). I have an 8 core i7 that was heading towards meltdown. I've never seen this thing run that hot. I followed the instructions for changing SMB from -1 (all available cores) to 4 and that seemed to do the trick after a pause/fold. Can anyone explain the difference between uniprocessor and SB? Has anyone found the magic config that gives most performance with least resource?
Edit: it's actually a 4 core i7 (shows up as 8 cores in the CPU monitor)
Edit: it's actually a 4 core i7 (shows up as 8 cores in the CPU monitor)
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I read up a little on the processor usage for F@H and there are benefits to the project in using SMP instead of UniP. Apparently SMP leverages a faster processing of folding trajectories and so accelerates results for additional computational operations across the matrix of WU's being addressed. Very interesting project...
I thought the point was to let it do the processing when you are NOT using the computer? In other words, while people are sleeping their computers can be used to help with a task for the greater good........
I can't do it, I have a very very slow connection that is also not persistent.
I can't do it, I have a very very slow connection that is also not persistent.
I think the Stanford folks just want as many federated CPUs as they can get volunteered to crunch some very large data sets. For end user usefulness, you're right that running it when the PC isn't being used would be the most non-intrusive. I am looking into optimizing because the default setting cranked my laptop up to 100% and whilst I really want to contribute, I don't want to come down in the morning and find a puddle of molten metal where I left my laptop 
My laptop seems to be going into some sort of sleep mode when I'm not using it. The desktop is still up and functional, but the processor switches to idle. Moving the mouse starts it back up. Gotta be a switch for this somewhere, but damned if I can find it. Idle time seems to be about 10 minutes before the processor shuts down.
One thing I've learned folding, for many years and over 1 million points already, is you need to watch how you configure this and other distributed systems because they will squeeze out any last amount of processor power/gpu resources you have and sometimes at the loss of hardware.
I'm not saying this to deter anyone but you need to be smart about folding. Many a moon ago someone installed folding on a large set of workstations in my old office and they ran haphazardly, full tilt, and gained many points but one evening the night was hot and the air stopped working and many of those office PC's were having issues because of heat issues. The air conditioning breakdown and the extra heat generated by folding at high levels on these PC's at the same time fried a few and others succumb to the heat.
I have my GPU running 100% fan always as well water cooling on my CPU due to overlocking (+1.2ghz overclock) and without those added protections as well watching the status of folding from various PC's in my reach my systems may have issues, reboot or lose a 350$ GPU.
Again, understand what your doing and contributing too but also understand the ramifications and dynamics of the hardware your using. With a little care risks can be mitigated but if you have no clue about how this works, the internals of your PC and what can happen when you use such an application; stop and ask here or don't do it.
It can be a great thing to help in research but not at the cost of personal hardware issues/damage.
My PSA for the day.. Fold on!
~Icky
I'm not saying this to deter anyone but you need to be smart about folding. Many a moon ago someone installed folding on a large set of workstations in my old office and they ran haphazardly, full tilt, and gained many points but one evening the night was hot and the air stopped working and many of those office PC's were having issues because of heat issues. The air conditioning breakdown and the extra heat generated by folding at high levels on these PC's at the same time fried a few and others succumb to the heat.
I have my GPU running 100% fan always as well water cooling on my CPU due to overlocking (+1.2ghz overclock) and without those added protections as well watching the status of folding from various PC's in my reach my systems may have issues, reboot or lose a 350$ GPU.
Again, understand what your doing and contributing too but also understand the ramifications and dynamics of the hardware your using. With a little care risks can be mitigated but if you have no clue about how this works, the internals of your PC and what can happen when you use such an application; stop and ask here or don't do it.
It can be a great thing to help in research but not at the cost of personal hardware issues/damage.
My PSA for the day.. Fold on!
~Icky
One thing I've learned folding, for many years and over 1 million points already, is you need to watch how you configure this and other distributed systems because they will squeeze out any last amount of processor power/gpu resources you have and sometimes at the loss of hardware.
I'm not saying this to deter anyone but you need to be smart about folding. Many a moon ago someone installed folding on a large set of workstations in my old office and they ran haphazardly, full tilt, and gained many points but one evening the night was hot and the air stopped working and many of those office PC's were having issues because of heat issues. The air conditioning breakdown and the extra heat generated by folding at high levels on these PC's at the same time fried a few and others succumb to the heat.
I have my GPU running 100% fan always as well water cooling on my CPU due to overlocking (+1.2ghz overclock) and without those added protections as well watching the status of folding from various PC's in my reach my systems may have issues, reboot or lose a 350$ GPU.
Again, understand what your doing and contributing too but also understand the ramifications and dynamics of the hardware your using. With a little care risks can be mitigated but if you have no clue about how this works, the internals of your PC and what can happen when you use such an application; stop and ask here or don't do it.
It can be a great thing to help in research but not at the cost of personal hardware issues/damage.
My PSA for the day.. Fold on!
~Icky
Well i did ask (see above), so far no one has responded. It's not a heat issue, it's a "time out" issue that I'm trying to correct.
F@H sometimes has issues with getting WU's out to people. If you've eliminated any "head end" issue with the provider and F@H is sending others units try checking a firewall or antivirus app locally that could be blocking the connection.
Also any Proxy configuration you may have may not warrant it's use but in all honesty could be many different things. The time out on connection to F@H is network related however timeouts on finishing up WU's could be a slow system and pausing it. If you get a WU check it's deadline and if you don't crunch the data enough before that date it counts as a failure.
I'll go back and re-read your post but did not believe it was intended to any one person. I'll be coming up with an informational at a latter time but just more wanted people to understand what this type of processing does and can do if left unattended and run by those who don't have an understanding. Again, not to thwart anyone's enjoyment in helping the cause but it can and has destroyed hardware for others I've known in the past when run haphazardly.
Cheers!
~Icky
I still think it's a switch set wrong in one of my settings, I just can't figure out which one. As soon as I move my mouse or open an app it's running again.
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