Folding Forum

I cannot run FAH 7.36 on medium or full, at times on a new Mac Mini, because other computers on a network rely on it & it slows other things down. Sometimes even light is too much. If I leave it set at idle, F@H doesn't run much even at night because this computer is seldom totally idle. It would be nice to be able to tell F@H to run light or idle during certain times & run full at other times. This computer will do at least 5,000 points / day of computing for F@H, if I manually make adjustments a few times a day, but this is often impractical.

If there is a way to automatically have F@H run full during certain hours & at slower speeds at other hours? I see no way to do this using FAHControl. Is there a way, or should I just give up running F@H on this machine? It would be a shame not to use this machine for folding because other than certain predictable times of day this computer has three & half of its four cores sitting idle.

Not knowing how to have FAHControl automatically adjust itself, I thought that maybe in the mean time I'd set FAHControl to full & simply tell it to load in just one work unit when I know the computer will not be that busy & then have FAHControl turn itself off, but I don't see how to keep it from loading in another work unit once it gets the one on which it is working to 98% complete.

Easiest choice would probably be to leave the client running, and have cron jobs start and stop folding with
FAHClient --send-finish
or
FAHClient --send-pause
and
FAHClient --send-unpause

You might need to enable cron jobs first.

Or you could customize /Library/LaunchDaemons/edu.stanford.folding.fahclient.plist to run the client at scheduled times.
Note that the plist will be overwritten whenever you install an upgrade for folding and need to be modified again.
launchd.plist man page
If you want a GUI, you could buy Lingon.
There are other editors. Just google for launchd plist editor.

You can change power levels from a cron job too.
Example

calxalot,

Thanks. Using terminal never crossed my mind. In the Apple II & early Mac days when there wasn't software for everything I used to be able to think outside the box & not rely on a GUI for everything. I never learned to use launchd. When Apple deprecated cron, I used iCal notifications to trigger applescripts for some noncritical things, but I've gotten away from even that relying on better & more powerful software. I've edited plists, but I haven't done that in a very long time either & only when I had an example I could modify from someone who knows far more than I do about plists.

To show how rusty I am, at first, I thought I was going to have to ask you how to get a list of commands, but then it finally occurred to me to type in fahclient --help. For now, I've got FAHClient running with a --Finish command. I like using terminal, but use it so seldom lately that I probably should buy Lingon & spend some time this weekend learning how to set up schedules on it. Learning everything I need to know to use launchd, would take me a while wouldn't it?

Thanks so much. These new Mac Mini machines are so quiet. The one here at home is sitting 4 feet from me & running around the clock at full for months. I cannot hear a thing. Maybe as it gets older the fan will get a little noisy, but then again, fans don't cost much. Again thanks for your ideas.

calxalot,

I made a very simple script using AppleScript that says: do shell script "FAHClient --send-command 'option power light'"

Using a free app from the AppleStore called LaunchOnTime it triggers the script at the time set in the app. Later the same app triggers another equally simple script that changes things back from "light" to "full".

The computer is now automatically adjusting power levels. Thanks again calxalot for telling me how.