Folding Forum

Okay first of all I tried searching the forum for this, and found no answer. If there was a thread about this and I missed it, I apologize.
This is somewhat related to my previous thread about OS selection : viewtopic.php?f=16&t=21458
I found that folding performance on Ubuntu is higher than Win7.
My question is, would a different Linux distribution give significantly better performance?
For example Lubuntu, which uses the very lightweight LXDE desktop environment (Ubuntu's unity is a real resource hog : http://www.renewablepcs.com/about-linux ... me-or-xfce see the table near the bottom of the page)
Or maybe a completely different distribution (not based on ubuntu/debian)
Any thoughts?

Several have been tested, the current favourite, mainly due to ease of use (especially for windows people) is ubuntu 10.10, it just works although some people are trying linux mint, and the guys over at OCN are saying that ubuntu 12.04 has improved frame times (i'm trying this out this weekend)

The only way to get the best possible performance is to custom compile your own kernel and do some hardware overclocking

The Linux distro has very little to do with it.

Answer two questions for me: 1) What percentage of the time is spent computing (when the FahCore is working at almost 100% CPU and how much of the time is spend doing functions that are part of the OS code? Fundamentally there's a small OS overhead when the task manager has to decide whether control should be given to the FahCore or to some other process. There's a small overhead when the Disk I/O code has to process the checkpoint. Neither of those adds up to much.

2) Is the FahCore for Windows identical code to the FahCore for Linux? Is the FahCore for one Linux distro identical to the FahCore for some other distro? In fact, the same Linux core runs on all distros but when you port a Windows core to Linux or a Linux core to Windows, the compiler generally needs different options because of how each OS handles multiple threads and how they manage large chunks of RAM. Both Windows and Linux run the same version of FahCore_78 (the old Uniprocessor Core) so performance is essentially identical. The SMP cores are different versions and may be compiled differently so the Linux FahCore is no longer identical to the Windows FahCore.

It's not that Linux is more efficient than Windows: it's that the Linux FahCore Vx.xx is more efficient than the Windows FahCore Vy.yy and that can change when a new version of either one is released.

Nathan_P wrote:Several have been tested, the current favourite, mainly due to ease of use (especially for windows people) is ubuntu 10.10, it just works although some people are trying linux mint, and the guys over at OCN are saying that ubuntu 12.04 has improved frame times (i'm trying this out this weekend)

Ubuntu 12.04 is my current folding OS. And isn't linux mint heavily based on ubuntu? "has improved frame times" compared to previous ubuntu releases? Good luck trying that out

Nathan_P wrote:The only way to get the best possible performance is to custom compile your own kernel and do some hardware overclocking

I have absolutely no idea how to do that and my hardware is already overclocked

To bruce :
1) I would guess approaching 100% with some amount of downwards fluctuations? I have seen the system monitor showing different services and processes taking up cpu time (somewhat like what happens in windows). That's why I wonder if a more stripped-down distro with less bits and pieces of unneeded software would increase performance.

2) You've given the answer for this one