Small, Normal and Big Work Units

[ford316]

I have seen post about the work units size.

- small = Configures the slot to get small WUs (~5MB)
- normal = Configures the slot to get normal WUs (~10MB)
- big = Configures the slot to get big WUs (~500MB)

I know why to set for small and normal is normal after all but big 500mb. My question is what would the advantage be to change the units to big vs leaving it normal? Now with being big "500mb" or so I am sure it will take longer than normal units and with the setting normal do we get "big" units sometimes and can my system handle the big units? I would like to do as much as I can with normal and or big units. Points don't really seem to matter at this time except for bragging thus I don't really care about points. Read my signature and you will know my system specs. If I can run big units I seen to use expert and config and expert again but not sure which side to use "client or core options" but the Name would be max-packet-size and the Value would be big... If I understand right... I have looked over some of the forums and even tried searching but searches are a pain at times when it shows every word you typed... like "to" for example then most to every post will be listed lol maybe there is a better way to search but I have not learned it yet Thanks for taking the time to read/post an answer

[P5-133XL]

That setting is normally used only with uniprocessor slots/client though I was told at one time that big was required to get bigadv's. All SMP WU's are inherently big so it has no meaning with SMP. It also has no meaning for the GPU.

What that setting does is allow the work servers to give you an appropriate WU for your HW. It was designed when RAM was commonly less than 640K and people were using phones to connect to the internet where network bandwidth was very slow with caps on how much could get transferred. Those numbers indicated how much data would get transferred back to Stanford but it also helped with low RAM situations. If you change it and there are no appropriate WU's then what will happen is you will not get a WU assigned to you

Since your signature indicates that you have an 8 core processor running v7.2.9, I wouldn't change it. You should be running an SMP slot and that setting shouldn't make any difference. So it runs under the general rule for a working system: If it works, don't fix it because the only change that can happen is it stops working.

[Joe_H]

Have you read the followup posts to the one where the use of small, normal and big was mentioned in response to your original question? As mentioned there, these tags have little to no effect on assignments for SMP folding slots. They mainly are observed in assigning work for Uniprocessor slots as older machines might have limited RAM resources, less than 512 - 1024 MB, or slow internet connections.

In my experience with those settings on my MacBook, with it set to small I get basically the same WU's as my other machines. The main difference in assignments is the that other machines will get WU's from servers that have a minimum SMP requirement of 4. But before one group of projects was set to that minimum, my MacBook also received WU's from those projects and took about 4 days to complete them.

So essentially they have no normal application for the rig in your signature. Now if you wanted to experiment with running multiple uniprocessor slots instead of SMP, then they might make a difference. As for the big setting, the only WU's that I know that applies to are bigadv. Those can not run on your system anyways.

[ford316]

Thanks P5-133XL and Joe_H for your posts. Yeah I am still fairly new to folding but not to computer hardware lol it's the software that always gets me for some reason my searching things like forums suck guess that could have something to do with not being 20 anymore lol Ok so the size of units don't matter anymore or atleast to my rig. Now this talk about running up to 8 Uniprocessor slots sounds like a project I just might work on soon and see how it goes. I understand we are in need of more folding computers thus prompted this question. Points aside I want to do as much as I can to help fold. Hopefully when I take on the 8 Uniprocessor slots I will not have any trouble but if I do I will be searching and/or posting in the forums for help. Thanks again