Folding Forum

... is greater than the total of the last seven years (2013-2020) !!

2020 to date ... 3,882,776,532,372

2013-2019 inc ... 3,816,279,860,253

Three different causes.
* We have a lot more clients since COVID
* We have a lot more clients since the demise of cybercoin mining.
* The tendency of benchmarks to recommend inflated PPDs.

The work unit count this year has strong Performance as well - about the same as the last 4 years.

What’s disheartening is the steady drop in number of users since April. There still seems to be some GPU work unit shortages, too, which I’m not sure I understand why that is the case other.

I guess we have to be realistic about the massive influx in March/April ... Many people will have signed up with little or no understanding of what folding entails in the way of impact on kit and related factors such as noise, heat, power bills ... Many probably didn't complete a single WU ... As soon as they began to understand that folding isn't just something you sign up to but actually utilises kit in ways that can impact other things many may well have quite rightly chosen that with hindsight FaH wasn't for them and stopped folding.

https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com ... ary.php?s= active users/weekly shows the bulge then decline ... As time passes some of those who initially chose to persevere may well decide the time has come to stop folding (for any of many reasons) and obviously for them this is the right thing to do and we need to be grateful that for a period they donated their efforts.

I am hopeful that the active users will level out at a much higher level than pre March (the graph looks promising) but time will tell ... It is possible that if/when a treatment/cure for Covid-19 is found and becomes widely available there may be a significant drop (but I hope not) ... It is also possible that further waves of infection and shows of public support triggered by key influencers might cause the number of active users might to peak again.

There may be cases where users where actually businesses donating their kit, but as they restart their normal business practices this needs to be reclaimed for regular business use.

There are also potential seasonal cycles coming into play where the hot summer weather causes folders to have to scale back their contributions through heat/cooling issues.

There's also much more powerful hardware on the market today.
A single 2080Ti can do what 4x 1060s would do before it, at a much lower electric cost; and also much lower heat generation.
Higher efficiencies allow some users to upgrade to better hardware.

The dip since then, has to do with:
a- People using FAH to heat up their homes, may shut some systems down during the hotter months
b- Covid layoffs has many people on alert, lowering their expenses for the next few months.
c- The Covid fear has worn off a bit. People no longer fear it as if it was going to murder 80% of the population in the most excruciating pains.
d- People often lose interest in things, desiring some change. And with the constant upkeep of one or more PCs, it can be a draining hobby (not only on the wallet, but time wise as well).

My extended family currently has a total of six computers all contributing under the same user name and all donating our points to the same team (not ours). Am I correct in assuming that FAH considers us collectively as a single active user even though there are actually six of us contributing?

Single donor ... If you check the stats for your donor then you should see at least 6 active clients (or more if any of the computers are multi slot slot folding) ... make sure all have the same passkey as well ... https://foldingathome.org/support/faq/points/passkey/

Yes, 6 machines under one username is one active user as F@h counts them. They also keep counts of the total active CPUs and GPUs, see the OS Stats - https://stats.foldingathome.org/os.