Folding Forum

In light of the WU shortage and server overload issues that are still happening,
is it possible to adjust the timeout for attempting to get a WU? I notice it uses an exponential backoff.
When I'm monitoring it's not a problem, I can just cycle it, pause-fold-pause-fold to shorten the 'Next Attempt' time until a WU is received.
But this is a problem when unattended, there are occasions where my computer sits idle for over an hour when it should be working the whole time!
I'd like it to not use exponential backoff, and just retry every minute or so.

this is set this way on purpose … by retrying every minute or so you would just be adding to the issues … AFAIK there is no way to override this and the team has requested that the pause/fold option is only used when the retry timer gets to 3 to 4 hours or so.

But then I'd be wasting power doing nothing. Usually I'd eventually get a WU after 5-10 attempts. Sometimes after 10-20.
Any updates on the shortage issue?

The shortage issue changes daily (or hourly). Every time I'm convinced it's getting better something else happens I go back into debug-and-report-the-problem mode.

Shutting down some hardware to save power is a reasonable alternative but:
Power consumed doing FAH is at significantly higher level than when it's not folding
Keep an eye on forum reports. There are long periods when FAHs servers are bandwidth-limited with periods of high distribution rates for new assignments. If one machine gets aan assignmenrt, fire up the next one. or two.

iceman1992 wrote:But then I'd be wasting power doing nothing.

I've said this before, but I will say it again. If you're worried that the power consumption from idling your computer for a few hours is gonna break your bank, then you shouldn't be folding in the first place. Even if you don't get any work for 5 hours, you will consume the same power in just ONE hour while folding