How to restructure multiple users from V7 to V8

[muziqaz]

Windows time sync is notoriously horrible

[appepi]

When I ask the multiverse - but excuse me a mo, my little red Nokia 2660 is telling me it is 8PM, and thus the time when electricity is semi-cheap at "shoulder" rates for 2 hours followed by 9 hours of "off peak" followed by 7 more hours of "shoulder", and so it is time to start Z441, Z442 and Z443 on another exciting 11-hour+"Finish and Stop") journey through FaHspace. Will edit the rest in later.

[appepi]

When I ask the Multiverse about the notoriously horrible status of Windows time, it leads me into the usual swamp that can be summarised as "sometimes". So I am not going there. All the devices are synching via Windows, except the air-gapped one that I plan to use after the collapse of cyberspace. [For details see https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/ ... bercrimes ]

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not saying that V8.4.9 Finish doesn't complete an ongoing WU. It does. The issue is that in some cases it doesn't STOP with an empty in-tray, but seeks out another WU. Which may not matter much if your ETAs are measured in seconds, but is expensive if they are measured in hours and take you into more expensive electricity rates.

OK, the only setup difference I noticed, as between Z805 (which seemed to Stop as requested after Finishing) and those devices that did not, was the fact that Z805 had been told to go to sleep after 30 mins of inactivity, while the others were all set to "Never". I have just verified with Z805 that these settings do not put it to sleep while a GPU-WU is running, since the WU has progressed over the last 3 hours it has been left alone. I doubt that the post-Fah-finish/pre-W10-sleep time of 30 minutes vs Never could be the reason why Z805 Stopped folding and the others went off to grab another WU, since 30 minutes is plenty of time to find a WU for a GTX1080. Nevertheless, I am replicating with another WU on Z805, and also I found that I had left 8.4.9 (de-linked) on Z802 (CPU only) so I set Z802 to sleep after 30 mins of inactivity and it is running with a CPU WU and all 24 Threads.

[I note in passing that this beautiful top-of-the-2011-line Z800 has 2x Xeon X5690s and 192GB of RAM because STATA16(SE) works fastest if you can fit the whole data-set into RAM, but unfortunately it guzzles too much electricity to make 100K-odd PPD from the CPUs a good return on investment. I only run it now and then to keep the spiders out.]

Apart from that, I now have 8.4.9 running CPU WUs in "Finish" mode on Z601, Z604, and Z605 with their previous settings so we'll see if they STOP or continue on to seek out another WU.

[appepi]

All is good with 8.4.9 Finish and Pause, so far as I can tell after more systematic testing.

I can't quite work out what Smilies to use because I should perhaps be embarrassed too, but I'm not. It was certainly the case previously that Machines I expected to have "finished WU and stopped folding" had taken on new WUs, but presumably that was operator error.

All my specific test jobs with 8.4.9 under W10 finished, and paused patiently for a minimum of 30 minutes without yielding to the temptation to seek out a new WU. This was true when Windows was instructed to send the PC to sleep after 30 mins and (another WU on the same Machine) Never, and with both GPU only or CPU-only jobs. I did not test both CPU and GPU together since normally I only run CPU jobs on devices without Fah-acceptable GPUs.

[muziqaz]

Please make sure to pause any folding before system restart to not lose any work

[appepi]

Please make sure to pause any folding before system restart to not lose any work

Well, I suppose the 80% complete WU I just dumped by mistake might help me remember this feature of W10 folding, but if it happens again I guess I'll have to put a post-it warning on the screen. So I'm afraid that remembering to Pause before shutdown or restart is still a work in progress. Luckily it is only an issue for this PC (8.49 in Z605 linked to account) where I have just started folding in the background, and am accustomed to shutting it down without thinking. Luckily it It isn't an issue on the three Z440/RTX2060 machines that run every day and do most of the work because the LAR System timer in 7.6.21 switches them to "Finish and stop" at 7am (end of cheapest electricity). Thereafter they idle till I wake up and shut down entirely. By starting them at the end of "peak "rates at 8pm, I can collect about 3M PPD at almost zero Delta$ (cost relative to unmanaged electricity use 29.05.2022 - 12.06.2022). This routine reminds me to keep paying attention to wasteful non-FaH usage, led me to find a better utilities plan, to obsess about device $$ vs PPD/kWh, etc. So far:

Uncosted Folding ----------------0.218 BP -----------------------------------------(19.03.2020 to 18.06.2022)
Costed Folding Weeks 001-052 1.192 BP @ Delta$=$405.52 = $0.34 per MP (19.06.2022 to 17.06.2023)
Costed Folding Weeks 053-104 0.706 BP @ Delta$=$204.96 = $0.29 per MP (18.06.2023 to 15.06.2024)
Costed Folding Weeks 105-149 1.080 BP @ Delta$=$071.94 - $0.07 per MP (16.06.2024 to 26.04.2025)

I note that these $ are AUD of course, currently = USD 0.64 or =UKP 0.48 or =EUR 0.56.

[Joe_H]

One thing that has been reported as causing a problem, even if you have the PC syncing time to an external source, is the logic board clock battery. People reported that a dead or dying one caused weird issues.

[appepi]

logic board clock battery

I assume that (in my case) we are talking about the CRC2032 button batteries that power the Real Time Clocks in Zx00s. It's true that the puzzling results were from antique Zx00 devices that I tend to run only once a month or so for for Windows and other updates these days. They spend most of their time dreaming of their early life (c2011-2015) as executive desktops that only had to do a bit of Outlook and Word when they lived in air-conditioned offices before being made redundant and ending up on eBay. Over the years since 2016 I have replaced maybe 3 batteries across 10 Zx00 workstations, which is easy enough to do since the Zxx0s were designed for user access - eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SUjxCX2_Gs - and of course the batteries are in every supermarket on the planet. But if I remember rightly, two of these were rather battered devices that hadn't seen aircon for a long time and whose batteries were DoA.

In such cases, if it fails completely you get the warning that it has forgotten the time when it boots up. But of course a dying battery might be causing intermittent timing problems problems well before it forgets the time entirely. So while I am staying with "operator error" for now, I'll keep it in mind.

[appepi]

Why does my 8.4.8 "WU Details" display for an ordinary task running in the background on Z605 Machine and Account Appepi show as a logged credit ...

Code User Team Credit Assigned Credited
Ok yoshineko 257728 98,730.8 2025-05-02 08:34:57 2025-05-02 13:41:47

May include credits awarded to other users.

But never mind - I found the answer here: viewtopic.php?p=368469&hilit=may+includ ... ed#p368469