General questions for me.

[dogsipod]

I have quite a few questions but they can prolly be answered by anyone.

I read lots of ppl talking about frames and rates involving them. (frames per minute,...etc.) I use the 5.04 linux version. Is a frame the same thing as a step?

What does the benchmark value reflect?

I completed a 4000000 step WU. Now I have a 50000 step WU and it seems to be taking longer. I mean it seems like before I was seeing like 10000steps every 15 minutes. With the new WU I see like 5000 steps every 20 minutes. Does the amount of steps reflect the difficultly of the WU, or is it possible to have a lower number of steps with each step actually taking longer to process?

[bruce]

Welcome to the folding forum, dogsipod.

A step is meaningful from an analytical perspective but it's (almost) a useless number for us. A protein with a lot of atoms runs slower than a protein with fewer atoms so it's not uncommon to find fewer steps or more steps in an individual WU assignment.

Unfortunately "frame" has two different meanings. For most people, the 100 printed statements in FAHlog.txt that report each 1% of progress are commonly called frames. Unfortunately, the word frame is used in a different way by the GUI client.

It is difficult to compare the time taken by an assignment from one project to an assignment from a different project. Click on the "Project Summary" link in the header of this page. The best indication of fast or slow projects is the number of points assigned to it.

Your question about the benchmark is really what you wanted to ask. It's explained pretty well in the Points FAQ.
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-Points After you read that, if you still have questions, come back and ask them.