Folding Forum

Hi,

I'm pretty new to Folding@Home, and I have a Mac (with the plain vanilla GUI installation of the newest client), which unfortunately has a lot less "forum info" available than Windows. I have three questions that I'm assuming are fairly basic:

(1) I've seen references to a log file. Where is it kept?

(2) When I run Folding@Home, my computer cranks to maximum CPU and gets really hot. The fans go on to maximum power and the computer starts to lag significantly. Is there any way to force Folding@Home to only use some of my cores? I have 4 real cores and 4 virtual ones thanks to hyper threading-Activity Monitor recognizes this as 8 cores and Folding@Home uses around 700% of my CPU power. I know this means fewer work units, fewer points, less scientific research, etc., but that's better than not running it at all because I can't deal with the high CPU usage.

(3) When I want to put my computer to sleep, I pause the client and then close my computer. Without fail, I lose all of my progress. I saw on some forums that it should write checkpoints every 15 minutes. What gives? How do I save my progress?

Sorry that I'm new to this and these aren't the best of questions but I hope that my additional processing power is useful .

Thank you.

The logs for the V7 client are stored in a folder within the main system wide Library folder. The path is:

Library --> Application Support --> FAHClient --> log.txt

By default up to 16 older logs are kept in log folder with the FAHClient folder.

You can change the number of cores from the default of -1 which uses all available. The number can be reduced in your case to 6 or less, 7 is know to run into issues. If you want, you can even just run a uni-processor slot. A pictorial guide to modifying settings using FAHControl is here, and the full description of setting up using FAHControl is on this page.

Your folding shouldn't fail that way when you put your system to sleep. Post your log and possibly we can see something there to explain what is going on.

If temps/noise are an issue then you can limit the number of cores that an SMP slot uses by switching to advanced mode and clicking configure. Go to the slots tab and double click the SMP slot. You choose the number of cores used for folding from there. Save, and then pause the client followed by an un-pause to force the change to occur immediately.

Thanks so much for your very quick (and helpful/detailed) responses! I really do appreciate your help. I guess the key was not switching to advanced mode. I've found the log, reduced the number of slots I'm using, and waited a moment for FAH to pause before shutting my computer and everything seems to work the way I want it to now. Once again, thanks for the quick and useful responses. Happy folding and happy holidays!