Folding Forum

Quick post as I lost all of my original question/description after been told that by including my fah log I might be posting spam. no time to put in all that post again so i thought I was ask another question that has been confusing me.

I am running the Folding@home-Win32-x86 client and get a mix of units/results. I have noticed some people get the same results on stats pages every single update. for example personA always gets 69 points, personB always gets 251 points and personC always gets 511 for every unit they complete.

How is this possible? are they using a different client or changing settings? regardless of client used I would have though there would be some difference

Hello Bozo, welcome to the forum.

By your own description, there are differences. People do get different types of work units, mostly because they have different types of clients. GPU vs. CPU, or vs. SMP client. There is also a smaller variation available using client settings, like WU size, normal vs. big. Same with adding the -advmethods setting.

The FAQs and the FAH WIKI talk about these things if you would like to read more about it.

In regard to the 511 point update - Older AMD/ATI GPUs (i.e. 4*** series ATI/AMD cards) running FAHcore 11 only fold on 511 point projects because these are the only work units available.

As 7im said, the number of different work units (and points) that a particular client will recieve depends on the particular configuration of the client.

k1wi wrote:In regard to the 511 point update - Older AMD/ATI GPUs (i.e. 4*** series ATI/AMD cards) running FAHcore 11 only fold on 511 point projects because these are the only work units available.

As 7im said, the number of different work units (and points) that a particular client will recieve depends on the particular configuration of the client.

ok makes sense - I thought it would be something like that - just didn't realise that there would be such a limited number of WU's available

I have done a lot of reading - too much, kept changing my mind and wondering about setting up rather than actually folding lol
anyway I am up and running now. i had been put off the GPU client but I think my work pc has an old ATI card - if I got 511 points might be better than the version I am running ( I had been put off with a post in these forums). Will probably just stick with the two instances I have running as it seems to be working well without any interferance from me (only a temporary voluntary role so wont have this pc for long).

by the way are these new forums or was my previous account culled due to inactivity - been a few years since I done any folding as my old PC couldn't handle it. I did try password reminder but username and email were not recognised.

These forums have been around since late 2007. If you were contributing earlier than that you were probably part of the original Folding Community Forum which crashed and couldn't be recovered, or something to that effect; I wasn't around back then.

Bozo wrote:ok makes sense - I thought it would be something like that - just didn't realise that there would be such a limited number of WU's available.

Two points here.

A) The number of Projects for a specific type of client should not be confused with the number of WUs.
For example, Serverstat shows that currently, the classic WUs are being assigned from two servers
143.89.28.72
171.67.108.33
(There are other servers that have WUs, but in one brief snapshot, I don't see any current activity on them.)

According to Psummary,
30399 WUs are available on 171.67.108.33 from (at most) 37 projects worth either 69 (by far the most common value), 145, or 209 points
and
50972 WUs are available on 143.89.28.72 from (at most) 13 projects worth 825, 1012, 1020, 1026, 1022, or 1030 baseline points.

Presuming that there is some variation in project priority, it's not unlikely that a lot of people running a Uniprocessor core are getting 69 point WUs most of the time.

B) It's in the best interests of FAH to have about the same number of WUs for higher priority projects as there are folks ready and willing to process them. That's never an exact match, of course, but too few higher priority tasks means that some percentage of lower priority tasks are being worked on and that more high priority tasks could be processed if they were available (which isn't all bad). What is often overlooked, however is that an excess of higher priority WUs means they sit idle on the server, waiting for someone to process them, and that slows down those projects which is certainly not good.