Folding Forum

About two years ago, I observed that when I was trying to upload a completed WU, if I did not have an active internet connection, after a few attempts, the WU upload would fail and it'll never be counted towards anything. No WU completed, no points, no nothing. All within deadline too. At least I THINK that's what happened -- it's been two years so I can't completely remember.

So instead of guessing, I thought I'll ask.

I have a personal laptop that I just installed FAH v7 on. When I'm at home, I have internet connection and can download/upload WUs and such. However, when I take my laptop to work, I can't connect to the internet. It actually lets me connect to their wifi, but then my machine is detected as a non-company machine, so while I have wifi, I have no internet access - as in everything is blocked. It's the same as having my wireless adapter turned off basically.

So I plan on downloading a WU the night before, having my laptop work on it while at work, but if it FINISHES BEFORE I GO HOME, I need it to NOT SEND THE WU BACK. It will fail on upload, and I don't want it to give up when I know it's because I'm on a network that's blocking all internet traffic!

Is this a valid concern, or is it smart enough to just queue the completed WU until the deadline and keep trying periodically. I somehow recall earlier versions of FAH having an option to prompt for connect, back during the dial-up ages, lol :X

The folding client always has been set to retry sending a WU later if it did not manage to do so the first time, so you are probably misremembering the details. Depending on the client, the retries do get less frequent, after the first few it will be several hours between them. It is possible you ran into a "bug" that caused the retry to not happen, but that is not the norm.

So, the default is to queue the WU up to send it back when possible. There can be a delay though depending on where the client is in the retry cycle once network connectivity is back. Another default action is to check on startup of the client for any WU's that need to be uploaded, a restart of the client will usually send any waiting. And finally, from a command line environment the client can be given a command to send a completed WU back.

The only thing I can think of would be to turn FAH off when you get to 99% and do the last bit when you get home.

Giving it a shot to see what happens after it finishes the WU without internet access...

In the meantime, second follow up question. It's looking like the WU I have right now will take ~3.5 hrs to process on my laptop. It's a project 8004 A4 core WU. Is there any custom flag or setting I can set to download a WU that'll take about twice as long? Or maybe three times as long? I'm just thinking of having a WU that basically lasts the duration of my time at work, so that I can grab the WU in the morning, process it during the workday, and send it back at night.

I understand timeliness is important for FAH, but I'm also considering how I can best maximize the amount of data I'm crunching.

enthrop wrote:Is there any custom flag or setting I can set to download a WU that'll take about twice as long? Or maybe three times as long?

Not really. You are sort of at the mercy of the assignment servers' code, the work available, and the priorities set by PG. You could get a small WU like the 8004, or something larger. How large will be partly determined by how many CPU cores you have set and what the required core count set on the servers.

Just as an example, recently my MacBook has received mostly SMP WU's from the projects in the 8000's, but early this morning got one from project 7610. The 7610 will take about 27 hours altogether, the 8000's ranged from around 3 to 9 hours depending on the specific project. The iMac and Mac Pro listed in my signature have also mostly been getting WU's from the 8000's with an occasional 7610 or 7611. But both got WU's from projects 7646 and 7647 on Sunday, those take 33 hours on the iMac at SMP:8 and 40 on the Mac Pro at SMP:6. I won't get those on the MacBook at all as the minimum SMP required for them is 4 as set on their server.

Why would you turn off FAH at 99%? There's a real danger that you can lose a WU if you shut down a core between 100% and "completed." I just let mine continue until it starts trying and failing to upload. Then it hardly matters whether you shut down fahclient or not. After connecting again, restarting fahclient will manage both the download of a new WU and the upload of the previous one. the number of points awarded decreases as the WU ages, and if you wait too many days, a WU might expire and then it will be dumped.