Folding Forum

Folding is working well and I'm earning 400,000 or so points/day. But periodically, while I'm working on the computer, the keyboard and mouse become unresponsive for 1-2 seconds.

I'm on Linux a have a GTX 1060 with 3GB of RAM and an i7 CPU with 6-core/12 threads and 32GB of RAM.

In FAHControl I have Folding Power set to "Medium" and nvtop reports GPU is running at 100% and MEM is 40%. It also appears the while the GPU is at 100% one of the CPU Threads is also at 100%. For the CPU slot I configured it to use a maximum of 4 threads so in total 5 threads are 100% and my total CPU load is 50%.

If I set Folding Power to "Light" then the GPU load drops to 10% but the gpu slot reports "Paused:waiting for idle" so little work is being done.

Is there some way to set the max GPU load to something like 50-80%?

FAH is designed to maximize the resources devoted to the scientific calculations. When you fold with a CPU, the OS manages the resources and priorites can be set and interrupts managed. The GPU isn't running an OS. It doesn't recognize priorities nor can a low priority task be interrupted by a higher priority task. When FAHCore_2* says "Compute THIS" the GPU allocates whatever it can to THIS. When the OS says "move the mouse pointer" that generally has to wait until THIS has been processed.

You have three choices:
* Get a faster GPU so that the screen (keyboard,mouse) delay is no longer noticeable
* Configure FAH's processing so that it only folds when the OS says your computer is IDLE
* reconfigure your OS, browser, (etc) so they use your CPU to manage the screen updates.

Setting in the OS tells you that using the GPU will be faster than using the CPU, but that assumes the GPU is not working very hard. My screen updates are plenty fast using the CPU but there are a number of different places you'd have to change a setting.

Bruce, txs for the info.

Do you have any links how how to configure linux to use GPU only for compute and not for Graphics?
Am I correct that an "easy" solution would be to purchase a second GPU card and create a "slot" for one of the GPU's and not for the other?

For others, I couldn't find "Only when idle" on my FAHControl, but it is available via Web Controller at http://localhost:7396.

Right click on a folding slot in FAHControl and a context menu will pop up, that menu includes the option of "On Idle".

If you do process separation it lessens it considerably, but to do so is a fairly advanced process requiring you to isolate cores at boot using isolcpus and then bind specific processes (the client running the gpu) to those isolated cores. Its not perfect, but its a lot better than without.

The key is to isolate 2 cores, setup the gpu client to run on one of them and use taskset to bind startx / X to the other, but it means you need to bring up your window manager manually, by loggin in at console and then issuing a tasket -c xx startx

This is hard for a beginner level user of Linux. But once done it forces a single fahclient instance to run on a single core and that core will feed only that client. Nothing else can use that core. The second core runs X and any other programs you use like firefox. You can then run a second instance of fahclient (in a separate directory) and assign it to do cpu folding on the other 10 cores. Unresponsiveness will be virually non-existent for regular tasks, but anything thats heavy on gpu, like watching youtube or netflix will require you to shut off the gpu folding.

i think i have run into this on ubuntu 18.04 LTS with a GT640 video card (only one in the system.) basically everything is fine at the console. for whatever reason, despite setting require-encryption to false, i can't get OSX's VNC client to connect to vino. so i decided to try x11vnc; it "works" but screen updates are excruciatingly slow at the remote machine. at first i chalked this up to poor wifi connectivity but eventually i found that if i paused the F@H computation on the GPU, the vnc connection improved immensely. starting it back up from the VNC client, the VNC connection then locks up. also, at some point while fiddling with this i managed to completely lock up the local X console and had to pull the big handle.

i may not have seen this on my W10 machine (which is also folding and rosetta-ing) since i'm using a faster AMD card as the primary display device - so far no problem connecting to that machine using TightVNC server as the screen sharing mechanism and display updates are snappy. or maybe this is just due to better drivers on Windoze.

maybe i need to go scrounge up an even crappier GPU and force X to run on that card. or i could just stop worrying about keeping tabs on the machine from my office and let it run...