Folding Forum

Another technique used mainly in older/slower machines is to reduce the CPU usage from 100% to something like 85-90% in one or both of the F@H instances. When that is done, F@H appears to release its hold on the CPU more readily, so there is less perceived delay in allowing other tasks to run.

You can try that for your setup, and see if it helps any.

jrweiss wrote:Another technique used mainly in older/slower machines is to reduce the CPU usage from 100% to something like 85-90% in one or both of the F@H instances. When that is done, F@H appears to release its hold on the CPU more readily, so there is less perceived delay in allowing other tasks to run.

I didn't think a C2D 6400 was an old slow machine but it behaves much better for me with F@H throttled back to 95%. On the other hand it's running Vista.

I run the SMP client on my E6850 at 95%, too. No particular reason, except I wanted to ensure from the start that my new machine would have the "snap" I expected from it. Maybe I'll bring it up to 98 or 100% one of these days, but it's running so well as it is...

sneakers55 wrote:

jrweiss wrote:Another technique used mainly in older/slower machines is to reduce the CPU usage from 100% to something like 85-90% in one or both of the F@H instances. When that is done, F@H appears to release its hold on the CPU more readily, so there is less perceived delay in allowing other tasks to run.

I didn't think a C2D 6400 was an old slow machine but it behaves much better for me with F@H throttled back to 95%. On the other hand it's running Vista.

To run Vista and FAH and something else, you'll need plenty of RAM. One of the main reasons that FAH seems to slow down other applications is when there isn't enough RAM, and "enough" was a smaller number for older versions of WIndows that what Vista considers "enough"

i set all my clients to 99% then if any cpu is needed fah will back off
99% is 99% free cpu clycles so if the cpu is been maxed out fah stops

do make sure your encoders are set to above-low or FAH may still take CPU speed

allso alot encoders may be set to only use 95% cpu if FAH is running fah may try to use the 5% in doing so the encoder will slow down more to make the cpu left back to 5%

Folding on my system uses a full 25% of my quad Q6600, spread across all four cores (not using SMP) since Windows slices the time up in that way (which doesn't overheat any one core, for me on stock heatsink fan running overclocked to 3.2GHz). My system also uses a full 25% of my quad Q6600 for Folding while I do a lot of Video Processing. This is because when you convert video your system is I/O limited when reading and writing disk, which therefore frees up sufficient processor time for Folding to run -- even when Folding is set to the lowest priority. But in no way is Folding competing for CPU cycles -- although maybe competes for RAM as mentioned above. If you notice, when running video conversions your system does not use 100% of the available CPU processing power. That is because half the time your system is reading and writing disk. I've processed/converted video for 375 full DVD's and what I said here has been the case for me for the last five years, no matter what processor I've had at the time. In fact, I ABSOUTELY LOVE my Intel quad because now I can run full-throttle conversions while at the same time doing almost ANY OTHER thing I want to do, thanks to I/O limits during conversions. Note: I have always used Ulead Video Studio, now using latest version. Maybe other video processing software does things differently. With Video Studio I can run Folding at the same time as I capture video from firewire, either HD or SD, which seems to indicate that Folding is running at low priorty.

Paul wrote:ok cool. How do I set the two 5.04 console clients as services? And I'm not worried about being in a team or having a special name, so all I need to do is just executed the files right?

I wonder if my university has a team. I might join that later if it does.

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You can join a Team whenever; just run the client (after a stop of course) in the -configonly mode (switch at start) and change the Team number from default team 0 to the Team (number) of your choice.
It 's best, in that case, to chose a name too.

Afterwards, you can change Teams without problem too, but if you want to keep your credits, you can't change your (user)name ...

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