Newbie questions

[G3WGV]

Just got going yesterday and I have three machines, 20 CPU cores in total, on the job 24x7. Only one WU apiece so far but I understand the reason for that and am looking forward to more soon. I've tried searching the forums but don't seem to have found answers to the following:

1. Points. One WU ran nicely to a quick completion on my fastest PC. Throughout the run it said that the estimated credit was around 2480 points. After the upload I got

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16:27:57:WU00:FS00:Final credit estimate, 2476.00 points

which seemed reasonable. I was therefore surprised to actually only get 243 points credited to my account and the team. An order of magnitude out means something must be wrong with my understanding or there's been some sort of glitch. What should I be looking out for?

2. My systems did a couple of WUs anonymously before I found the team I am now with. Is there a way to reallocate the 600-odd points to my team?

3. My old I7 machine has a GEFORCE GT610 GPU, which I now know to be not really good enough for this sort of work. It's trying to run a WU but it's dreadfully slow and it's making it nearly impossible to use the PC. Right now it's saying that the WU will probably time out before it can complete. I don't mind leaving it running for the next 7 days but is it worth it? I am minded to remove the GPU from folding tasks but is there a better way?

My PCs say thanks for letting them come out to play. I hope the community can shed some light on these questions. Thanks in advance.

John.

[davidcoton]

1. IIRC you don't bonus points until you have "qualified" by returning ten WUs with 80% success. So keep folding, points will match estimate soon.
2. No. Sorry. It is F@H policy that points are never transferred between users or teams.
3. In this case it is probably easiest to pause, delete the slot, and Fold. It will produce some errors, probably "DUMPED" or similar, so don't do that if you are still qualifying (see 1) and have any other WUs returned with errors.

David G8KDD

[G3WGV]

Thanks David.

1. I had read about bonuses but never imagined that they could be 90% of the points. None of my PCs got any new WUs overnight, so it might take some time to get to ten apiece! How is "success" measured?

2. OK. I sort of suspected as much but thought it was worth asking.

3. I think I'll probably do that. It's really quite invasive and there's not much to lose this early on. With no new WUs on the horizon I could be a long time "qualifying". I assume each PC has to separately qualify?

As usual with these geeky techy things there seems to be quite a lot of us radio amateurs involved!

John.

[G3WGV]

I seem to be getting a lot of errors like this:

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12:40:47:WU00:FS00:Connecting to 18.218.241.186:80
12:40:47:WU00:FS00:Assigned to work server 40.114.52.201
12:40:47:WU00:FS00:Requesting new work unit for slot 00: READY cpu:7 from 40.114.52.201
12:40:47:WU00:FS00:Connecting to 40.114.52.201:8080
12:41:08:WARNING:WU00:FS00:WorkServer connection failed on port 8080 trying 80
12:41:08:WU00:FS00:Connecting to 40.114.52.201:80
12:41:30:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Failed to connect to 40.114.52.201:80: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

As far as I can see Internet connectivity is just fine here but none of my PCs has had any WUs now for over 24 hours and I see these errors frequently, so I am wondering if something is amiss here or if it is just heavy server loads.

** Update: I reckon it's just server load, as I'm now just getting lots of

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13:20:55:WARNING:WU00:FS00:Failed to get assignment from '18.218.241.186:80': No WUs available for this configuration
13:20:55:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Could not get an assignment

My PCs tell me that they are enjoying the time off work but I fear they will soon start becoming restless

John.

[davidcoton]

You only need to qualify under your user name. So ten machines with one unit each or one machine with ten units.

Those errors all look like the server overload problem. You will notice that the retries back off exponentially. If the delay between attempts gets too long, Pause/Fold will reset it. Just don't do it too often because that will make the problem worse.

[G3WGV]

OK, three days later and some more resources on-line, things are starting to make a bit more sense. Except points.

I'm not really all that concerned about points, after all, we're doing this as a community effort - right? But as soon as there are points and teams then there is competition, and I really do not understand how points are accumulated. I think I should, and I suspect many others wonder too.

For three days I ran occasional work units as they were presented to me and typically got a few hundred points for each WU. By yesterday morning I have accrued around 5k points and was still under the magic ten WUs completed. Yesterday two things happened, I finally broke free into the sunny uplands of 10+ WUs and I put more resources including a powerful GPU on line. This morning I was fair amazed to find that my points had leapt to 425k.

So what is going on here? If I look back over the past 24 hours I have gone from 8 to 18 WUs completed. The logs say that each WU was worth around 13k points, so 10x13k = 130k. How did I get from 5k to 425k points with only 130k of new WU points? The result is that I have shot from almost at bottom of my team's table to close to the top in the space of 24 hours! Questions might be about to start being asked...

Surely there must be some sort of guide to the points system?

Thanks as always,

John.

[davidcoton]

As you noticed, once you qualify for a bonus the point leap up, It reflects the value to F@H of high-power systems returning results quickly.
For the same reason GPUs normally get far more points than CPUs.
As for the mystery credits, they are probably earlier folded WUs where the points were delayed in transit, but that is only a semi-informed guess.
The guide to points is here.

[G3WGV]

Thanks again David. I see that my GPU is busy crunching something that it thinks is worth 136,697 points. That must be the one that will come up with the right answer! GPU is getting a bit hot under the collar about it but it knows it is all in a good cause.

[Joe_H]

If your GPU temperature becomes an issue, there are utilities that some folders use to set power or temperature limits. Those reduce the clock to keep within the set limits. Reduces the maximum throughput, but may be a bit more efficient on power used, the last 10% or so of performance takes more than that in power to achieve.

[G3WGV]

Thanks Joe. Most of my folding is on a new PC that I built earlier this week: Ryzen 3950X + RTX 2070 Super. I'm still getting used to how it behaves and, indeed, am happily letting F@H stress test it for me. GPU temperatures seem to be OK, stabilising out at around 65C on a long fold. I'm a bit more concerned about CPU temperatures - I have seen as high as 91C in mid fold and that feels uncomfortable. I probably need to improve my cooling strategy but in the meantime I think I will reduce the number of CPUs F@H can use from 30 down to something like 16. Any thoughts you might have on that will be appreciated.

John.

[PatrickHelmick]

Need help, please. 2014-era desktop not meeting timeout deadline. Estimated PPD: 882.

[Darth_Peter_dualxeon]

OK, three days later and some more resources on-line, things are starting to make a bit more sense. Except points.

Register to get a passkey, that will increase the points many times.

[Darth_Peter_dualxeon]

Need help, please. 2014-era desktop not meeting timeout deadline. Estimated PPD: 882.

Can you describe what kind of hardware this is? A desktop pc can be anything from some small system running web browser to someone having a server on the desktop.

[G3WGV]

Register to get a passkey, that will increase the points many times.

I have had a passkey since first registering with F@H. Having done some more research I now better understand how points are allocated, and that sometimes it takes quite a while for them to show up

[PatrickHelmick]

Need help, please. 2014-era desktop not meeting timeout deadline. Estimated PPD: 882.

Can you describe what kind of hardware this is? A desktop pc can be anything from some small system running web browser to someone having a server on the desktop.

Please click on my name for hardware configuration.