Folding on a slicehost VPS?

[nfriedly]

I have a virtual server on slicehost and it's had my website + folding@home for the past year or so. The website is generally snappy, but every once in a while takes over 5 seconds to load. (Usually the site loads in under a second - there's no database calls, just a couple of php includes.)

My understanding of Xen is that I get some number of "credits" that give me access to the cpu with equal priority to everyone else, and then after those are gone, I have to wait until everyone else finishes with the cpu or I get more credits. What I'm thinking is happening is that the other virtual servers on the physical server are getting more traffic, so my 5 second delays are when my account is waiting for more credits.

Assuming that is the case, is there any way to "dial down" folding at home, to still run, but not burn through *all* of my credits? I know the windows client has a 'CPU percentage requested' option, but I couldn't find it on the Linux one.

(BTW, I cleared running FAH with slicehost before I signed up. They said go for it and they'd let me know if there was any trouble.)

[bruce]

I think this will answer your question: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=5135

[nfriedly]

That is helpful, but I just read here that the xen accounting period is 30ms, meaning that it shouldn't take 5 seconds for me to get new credits. http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/CreditScheduler

I also re-factored the site to use static html for unauthenticated users just to see if not loading php made a difference, and it's still having occasional long load times. So I'm wondering if it's something else entirely. I think I'm going to kill folding on that server for a few days and find out.