Folding Forum

first off all, in mint 13 my athlon ii x4 pulls about 7k average. im in a team tc and lost, in order to have better chance next month I really need to be pulling atleast 10k hopfuly 12 k out of this. any 'tweaks' are 'hacks' you could fill me in on? are there any linux distros that do a good deal better then others? im willing to switch. second, I've noticed that depending on the wu I pull between 3-13k. is there any way to make this a little more consintint?

things will even out if you just keep folding. you will find that eventually you get long runs of certain WU. also have you configured a passkey?

about 7k may be right for that cpu.
I have a Phenom II 970 and it won't average 10k.

Try to be logged out of any graphical desktop environment on your distro as much as possible - I find that this reduces my TPF:s with at least 4 seconds across the board. Gnome3 especially seems to run a ton of background processes which slows FAH down. I am running Fedora 17 on an overclocked (4.2) 3930K.

csvanefalk wrote:Try to be logged out of any graphical desktop environment on your distro as much as possible

How exactly can I do that?

iceman1992 wrote:

csvanefalk wrote:Try to be logged out of any graphical desktop environment on your distro as much as possible

How exactly can I do that?

just log out - in Gnome3 for example, click your name in the top right corner and select Log Out from the menu. You can still run any of the F2-F12 terminals normally (use CTRL+ALT+F[2-12] to select them) in case you need to use some non-GUI programs.

Also, you might want to run FAH on a RAM disk, especially if you are using EXT4 as a file system. This will practically eliminate I/O delays between WU:s, and thus give you a shorter transition period between a finished WU and a new one.

Beware that RAM disks are volatile - they dissapear (with all their content) when you power down. For me it works since I practically never reset my machine, apart from kernel and hardware upgrades (and the rare times I have to boot into windows). If you do have to reset, just backup your FAH content so you can move it back to a fresh RAM disk when you boot up again. I am currently writing a system script to do this automatically, will share that later.

To turn the defaul FAH directory into a RAM disk, run (as root):

$ mount -t tmpfs none /var/lib/fahclient -o size=1024m

Be sure to do the backup stuff suggested above first. Alternatively you can of course mount the RAM disk somewhere else, and run a client there instead.

The are better ways to improve the ext4 file system functionality with incurring the risks of a ram drive.

Ran briefly smp on opensuse,I just booted up to runlevel 3 and logged in there to cli,seemed to run better (more efficient that way),did the setup from a GUI tho,setting up samba,download patches and download folding software,set it up and so forth,then it was runlevel 3 and less resourcehogs interfering with F@H.