Folding Forum

Apologies if this has been asked/dealt with before. I have a friend who would like to take part in FAH, but she has an oldish, low-powered laptop and, in order to keep costs down for her, is on a broadband plan which restricts the amount she may download (the figure is 10Gb per month, she thinks). She's not a heavy user of the internet, but would be anxious not to exceed her monthly allowance, if she were to join FAH. The laptop runs Windows XP and (I think) is usually powered by the internal battery. Do you have any tips on settings she could use in FAH to reduce the amount of data she would send/receive, or is there a guide to this somewhere already? I apprciate the above info might be a bit sketchy, but would be glad for any pointers. Thank you.

Hello admirMI, welcome to the forum.

An older laptop is unlikely to break that quota. However, feel free to install a download meter utility (free apps on download.com) to help monitor her quota. If she gets close, shut down the client for the rest of the month, and then start folding again next month.

Other than that, there isn't a way to control bandwidth usage. Fah uses what it uses, which isn't much.

Here's some comparison figures for data usage:

The largest data-usage client I have is my bigadv-grade server (32 Intel cores, way more powerful than what this friend has, and she can't get this type of work). It's usually able to complete two bigadv WUs per day, with each WU having a download size of around 28 MB and an upload size of around 88 MB. The sum total of data usage per month is therefore around 7.25 GB.

The closest piece of hardware I have to what this friend would be using would be my i7-3770k. The largest WUs I can seem to find in my recent log history are 2 MB download and 13 MB upload. This took my rather high-end processor around 7.5 hours to complete, so assuming that's all I got it'd be around 1.5 GB/month. A number of other projects have even lower monthly data usage rates, such as a project with an 875 kB download size and 1.6 MB upload size that takes me a little over 2 hours to complete (0.8 GB/month).

In both cases the comparison is to high-end hardware. An oldish, low-power laptop is likely going to be turning in WUs of the size that my 3770k does and completing them on the order of once every few days. Even if it's a quarter of the speed of my CPU (which seems optimistic), that's worst case around 400 MB/month.

I also just noticed you said that she thinks it's 10 GB/month download. It may be a total usage limit, but if it does ignore uploads, she'd be even better off, because as you can see above the download sizes are significantly smaller than the upload sizes. You may want to check the details, though.

Thanks for your replies. That sounds encouraging.

One thing you mentioned was that she usually uses the laptop powered by the internal battery. Folding uses the CPU very heavily which will run down the battery very quickly. We usually only recommend running the client on a laptop with the power supply connected. The default settings of the current client will pause folding when on battery, so please keep that in mind.

Thanks again for the input. I'll pass that on.