If I pause or switch the amount of power I want my computer to dedicate, the progress bar (on a pretty large WU) will decrease by a few percent. In the log, the number of steps will go down as well. Compare the beginning of the log to the end.
Yes, this is normal. After pausing the client will restart at the last checkpoint that was written by the folding core. In the case of CPU WU's such as the Core_A4 one being worked on in your log, the default checkpoint frequency is every 15 minutes. So at most you will redo that much processing.
For current GPU folding cores the checkpoint frequency is set by the researcher running the project. Typically it is set between 2 to 5% of progress.
If you examine the work folder contained in the F@H data folder on your system, you can see the modification times of the current and the previous checkpoint files. If you pause about a minute after the current checkpoint file is written, then you are sure that the entire contents have been flushed to your drive from being cached while being written.
It would be nice if the new cores being developed like core17, core18 (and preferably update old ones a3, a4, core15) would report in logs when they successfully written checkpoint files. This would allow in future to implement an option in GUI to pause WU after next checkpoint.
It doesn't seem to take much work for a developer to add unified lines to core output like:
Writing checkpoint at xx%
Checkpoint at xx% written and verified successfully
In GUI there could be a timer when last checkpoint was written and maybe even average time between checkpoints to see if You should pause WU immediately or wait for next checkpoint.
This would really help uses who are not 24h folders.
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