Folding Forum

Last week I logged into one of my school's shell servers, and noticed that it seemed to be running sluggishly. Running top, I saw that a user was running folding@home on the server and maxing out all 8 cores.

I emailed the user, a fellow student, who told me that since folding@home will turn itself off appropriately as processes with normal priority are run, I shouldn't notice any difference. I will freely stipulate that on a server with many users at a given time, there could be many reasons as to why my connection felt "sluggish". However, the FAQ says that you shouldn't use computers that aren't yours to run folding@home.

Other than emailing this user, and the sysadmins, is there anyone I can convince this guy to stop? Or is he correct in claiming that his program shouldn't be affecting my use?

The FAH client software does have an impact on running computer and if it is running SMP or number of CLIs on each CPU then it is even more obvious (if nothing else then large memory and disk IO). It can be configured to not occupy the whole system, but that is not the main focus here.
The FAQ is clear about it. If it is not his/her computer and there is no (written) permission to run it then there is no reason to run FAH client on that piece of hardware.

Hello cmuguy, welcome to the folding forum.

Yes. Running FAH on a computer that you do not own, or that you do not have permission to run FAH from the computer's owner is a violation of the End User License Agreement. However, your fellow student may have permission. Ask the student about permission and the FAH EULA if you like.

As to how fah behaves in regards to resources, that depends if the student is running 1 high perfomance client using 8 cores, or running 8 standard clients, each using a core. The standard client does give up CPU resources when other programs run with a higher priority. However, it does not give up the memory it uses.

If running the 1 high performance (SMP) client, that client does not give up resources as well as the standard client, and uses considerably more memory.

Additionally, the shell setup at your school may affect how the FAH client gives up resources, or not give up resources.

Run a test. Have him stop fah, and see if the sluggishness goes away.

I prefer to work with someone then against them, but if uncooperative, then involve your sysadmins, school IT, etc.