Macbook high CPU usage, fan activity when running F@H

[Damianm]

Hello all,

I just started using F@H and am excited to contribute to this research community. However, I have been having some trouble running F@H.

While Folding at Light, my Macbook Pro (2011) gets very hot and the fan is running high to combat heating issues. The CPU usage reads anywhere from 168% to 240%. I've tried configuring a lower CPU usage within the advanced settings in FAH Control, but this has not had an effect in reducing my Mac's CPU usage.

Is it possible to use F@H with a Macbook laptop and not have it overwhelm my laptop's CPU?

Here are my specs:
Processer: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory: 4GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Hard Drive: 320 Gigs total, 100 Gigs free

Thanks in advance for your help!

Damian

[bruce]

Welcome to foldingforum.org, Damianm.

The folding power slider is supposed to allow you to adapt your level of participation to whatever works best with your hardware. The default setting of medium may be more than you choose to contribute. Have you tried moving the slider to "idle" or to "idle light"?

FAH does use the computer more heavily than when it's not doing anything or you're using it for light activities like browsing and that naturally generates more heat. You need to figure out what works for you.

[Damianm]

Hi Bruce,

Thank you for the recommendations. Unfortunately, I haven't had any luck with "idle" or "idle light". I experimented with the FAH Control configurations but I found that even when running at the lowest setting of idle and idle light and configuring my FAH advanced settings to as low as 10% "Percent CPU Usage", my CPU was still overwhelmed by FAH. My Mac activity monitor showed FAH running at 200% CPU usage and my Macbook was hot and the fan was running constantly.

I was hoping to run FAH in the background without much disturbance as I use my computer all day. But it seems at even the lowest settings FAH uses a lot of my CPU. Wish there were some more laptop-friendly settings.

If you have any other recommendations, I'd love to hear them! Thanks again, Damian

[Zagen30]

That CPU usage slider doesn't work very well when the WU in progress is using multiple cores. You're better off setting it back to 100%, then editing the CPU slot to use fewer threads. The default of "-1" means it will use all 4 of the i5's threads. I'm not sure how much better temp-wise setting that to 2 would be, as it'll still be hitting up the 2 physical FPUs all the time. You might be better off going to two single-threaded slots, at which point the CPU usage slider would actually work properly as far as I know.

Are you actually seeing much lag? Yes, FAH will use all the processing time it can, but with CPUs that doesn't usually interfere with other tasks because of good scheduling (GPUs are another story). Unfortunately, laptops are not very well-suited to folding because of their inability to dissipate heat.

Actually, on Idle or Idle Light you shouldn't be seeing any FAH usage when you're doing something else. Was it running when you were actively using the computer?

[Joe_H]

One thing not mentioned is that some of the changes made by the slider take effect either with the next WU or after pausing and restarting folding. As for that CPU percentage setting in Advanced, that only works with the single processor folding. Could you post the beginning of your current log file so we can see the system information and also part of the log showing the current folding settings? Possibly we can make some further suggestions based on that to get usage to a level you are comfortable with on your MacBook Pro.

As for folding at a reduced level, I have not done too much of that on my MacBook. It has been running at full load for much of the last 3 years and just gets warm. Letting it get airflow under the case helps, and also blowing out the dust occasionally. The plastic case may help in the heat perception as well, the aluminum case of your MBP does do a good job of transferring heat to its outer surface. In any case I can try a couple things based on what you post and see what it does on mine.