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Never starts at idle

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 10:49 am
by kaper
Hi guys! I'm new to folding and I have a problem that someone may be able to help me with:

My pc should start folding at idle. It never detects idle though. I have windows powersettings at high performance because I had some issues with responsiveness when it was set it to balanced. Could this be causing the client to never think it is idle? What definition of idle is used by the client? Setting the affinity to "a little higher than lowest" didn't change the behaviour ofcourse.

I don't want to manually start and and pause the client because it must only run when I step away from my pc for a while. I am logging power usage and running a script to estimate the electricity cost of all poweruse above idle power. (I want to donate but I don't want to be poor) To do this acurately folding must only run at idle. Turning it on and off every time I go make a cup of coffee is just not the way to go.

If folding at idle only works with balanced powersetting or sleep or something turned on, is there an other way to turn folding on or off? Does an interface for start/stop from an external source exist in the client? Starting and stopping the entire client from a script seems a bit rough and also doesn't give the client time to save any progress which is a waste.

Any thoughts would be really apreciated! Thanks!

Re: Never starts at idle

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 2:08 pm
by Jorgeminator
Depends how tech-savvy you are. Yes, the client can be controlled remotely via telnet through an Android app for example.

Re: Never starts at idle

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 5:01 pm
by wezh
Hi!
Thanks for help for mankind!
I am ordinary user like you and also using idle state of PC for FAH Client. I run it on Manjaro Linux OS. I am using FAH client from Arch User Repository (it is for Arch Linux based distros, which Manjaro is) v7.5.1. I think it is official client.
What definition of idle is used by the client?
I execute FAHClient from command line with

Code: Select all

FAHClient -v --idle
I see that my default idle is 300 seconds.

For me it's works like this: if to do not touch keyboard or mice within idle delay, it's starts to fold - no matter you watch youtube video or local video in VLC media player. If to touch keyboard btn or mice than in a few seconds folding pauses.
I fold in idle for several days and always it goes well for me.

Try to investigate what is your idle delay and try to change it. Try to setup delay to 20 seconds and pull off keyboard and mice connectors from PC to test if them sends idle interrupt signals continuously.

Re: Never starts at idle

Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2020 5:50 pm
by bruce
Your OS has a couple of settings you might check. The one that must be set is whatever establihes the time before a screensaver would kick in if you had one. The one that must NOT be set is the one that says the machine should hibernate/sleep when it's idle.

Re: Never starts at idle

Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2020 3:35 pm
by kaper
Thanks for your help guys! It is fixed.
It was indeed the screensaver that activates the idle folding. I had mine turned off. Sorry for bothering you with such a simple question.

My script is now running nicely and I am very happy :)