Folding Forum

Last night I downloaded WU 7903 (24, 1, 3) this morning on checking I see it has only done 2%. It is showing a TPF of 3 hours 30 minutes and a ETA of 14.32 days. I am relatively new to folding and have never seen a WU need more that 2 days to complete, is this normal or is there something wrong? My system is an Athlon 2 X4 640 with 4GB of memory running Windows 7 X64 and V7 FAH, although I run it most of the time I do occasionally turn it off at night so the completion time is probably going to be extended.

Not sure what was happening, have left it running all day after taking 12 hours to complete 3% it is now up to 19% with TPF of 47mins 24 secs. Will just have to leave it running, I usually turn this computer off at night as it is in my bedroom.

Welcome to the forum, TheCraiks.

I believe v7 does have a known bug where it improperly estimates TPF, and that it's going to be fixed with the next release. Your account suggests that it wasn't wrong, however, if it was only at 2% after several hours; v7 can't improperly report completion percentage to my knowledge.

Is there anything that could have been running last night, like an antivirus scan?

Not that I know of, the only other thing running was an ATI GPU work unit, which I have done before so know the SMP work unit does take a bit of a performance hit but never to this extent. Perhaps I would be better off not running GPU units, at least it is now giving ETA of 1.57 days so might only have one sleepless night.

It's not uncommon for the ATI GPU to take as much as one full CPU-core. If your system contains a dual-cpu, that can seriously impact SMP folding because you'll only have slightly more than one CPU. The deadlines can be quite comfortably met by a quad and a dual which is more or less dedicated to FAH but they're going to be challenging for anything less than a true dual (i.e.- a single-core with hyperthreading informs the OS that it's a dual-cpu system but there's only one floating point unit which must be shared, so it won't perform like a true dual. What kind of CPU do you have, and do you run anything else 'heavy'?

The ETA calculations in V7 are sometimes correct, but certainly not always, until the bug is fixed. Just look at the log for messages saying xxx out of yyy completed (zz%) which are associated with the unit being run by your SMP slot, calculate the time difference and see how closely it matches the TPF.

bruce wrote:It's not uncommon for the ATI GPU to take as much as one full CPU-core. If your system contains a dual-cpu, that can seriously impact SMP folding because you'll only have slightly more than one CPU. The deadlines can be quite comfortably met by a quad and a dual which is more or less dedicated to FAH but they're going to be challenging for anything less than a true dual (i.e.- a single-core with hyperthreading informs the OS that it's a dual-cpu system but there's only one floating point unit which must be shared, so it won't perform like a true dual. What kind of CPU do you have, and do you run anything else 'heavy'?

TheCraiks wrote:My system is an Athlon 2 X4 640 with 4GB of memory

Thanks for the help, after doing a little more reading about GPU units and especially ATI ones I think I will leave them well alone.

Finished, I see it uploaded 28.83 MB of data so was this quite a large work unit?

The wuresults size will vary on the Project type. Some are few KBs (mostly GPUs) while others can be 200MBs (mostly bigadvs). If you could tell us the Project number, somebody who has already folded that Project might be able to comment on the wuresult size.

Hi thanks, the original query had been about the length of time it was taking but that sorted itself out. Then when it was finished it took almost 15 minutes to upload the file, its reported size being 28.83MB, the largest I had previous seen was 7MB. The work unit was a 7903 (24, 1, 3) and taught me not to mix ATI GPU units. And then I check my main folding computer to see it has just done a 7904(76 1 0) unit and uploaded 23.65MB.