Folding Forum

I need to install a windows update. Can I stop or pause folding? If I do will I lose my work? If I can stop and restart, how do I do that?

Yes, you can pause folding. Give the folding client a minute or two to help insure the files are all written out and closed before restarting your PC. Both Web Control and FAHControl have Stop or Pause buttons.

Reason for pausing first and waiting a bit is that there is a bug in one of the folding cores that does not always leave files closed properly on Windows shutdown, Windows does not wait on the client to completely exit.

Thank you so much for your speedy response!

As a precaution, I would pause any work units that are "in progress", before going through the power off and restart process--regardless of the O/S in use. And as Joe said, give FAHControl sufficient time to direct FAHClient to peacefully save the current WU's progress before restarting. The last thing you want is for WU's to be dumped because the error detecting checksums do not agree.

Paul

Exactly. I did wait as instructed, and no problems. Thank you.

You are welcome. I have manually dumped work units over the past week or two due to the concern of possible file corruption, from having my systems powered off w/o warning (due to storms in the area). So one last bit of advice I'd offer to those with newer systems (that have value to you due to their age; or personal work/school files that you may have created on them), would be to pause work units in progress. And then power them down peacefully for the duration of the storm.

Paul

I wish we had rain storms here, when we do, there's seldom any lightening. I just have a laptop now. Back in the day I did UD, United Computing looking for a cancer cure. I had 5 boxes I built for the project. It was fun, and I was sorry to see it end. Thanks again for your excellent advice.
BTW, the fan runs all the time is that okay? And is it weird that my video card is doing twice as much work as the processor?

For the record,if you restart your computer without first explicitly pausing your FAHClient (via either FAHControl or Web Control), then you will most likely lose at least SOME work.

If I'm not mistaken, FAHClient is by default configured to save a "checkpoint" every 15 minutes. Restarting FAHClient after a shutdown should be able to recover all work saved in the latest checkpoint (but not any subsequent work, between the checkpoint and the shutdown).

By explicitly pausing your FAHClient before shutting down your computer, you are guaranteeing that ALL work will have been saved into a checkpoint.

If I'm not mistaken, FAHClient is by default configured to save a "checkpoint" every 15 minutes. Restarting FAHClient after a shutdown should be able to recover all work saved in the latest checkpoint (but not any subsequent work, between the checkpoint and the shutdown).

Yes I read that somewhere on the forum, I looked for help with this before I posted. Thank you

I thought of one item I forgot to mention, if the Windows update includes a driver update for the GPU you will want to disable that if you are doing GPU folding. The updated driver through MS will often break the OpenCL installation and cause folding to fail on your GPU. For GPU driver updates get them from AMD or nVidia's download sites instead.

YosiMor wrote:If I'm not mistaken, FAHClient is by default configured to save a "checkpoint" every 15 minutes.

For GPU projects, the checkpoint frequency is defined in the work unit (typically every 5%) and is not controlled by the config setting. The config setting (1-30 minutes) only applies to CPU projects (with exceptions?).

YosiMor wrote:By explicitly pausing your FAHClient before shutting down your computer, you are guaranteeing that ALL work will have been saved into a checkpoint.

GPU projects resume from checkpoint even if you gracefully pause and shut down the client, so if you stop a client before reaching 5% on a GPU project, it will start from the beginning.

gunnarre wrote:...GPU projects resume from checkpoint even if you gracefully pause and shut down the client, so if you stop a client before reaching 5% on a GPU project, it will start from the beginning.

They will always start from the previous 5% so you'll loose somewhere between 1% and 5%. The same is true for CPU projects where the previous checkpoint may have been between 1 and 15 (or 30) minutes ago.

Fortunately it's a lot easier to look at the progress percentage on the GPU projects. If I see progress that's 5 or 10 or ... 90 or 95 %, I'll restart. If I see 4 or 9 or... 89 or 94 or 99, I'll wait for it to do 1 more percent. It's harder to figure out if a CPU project just did a checkpoint or if it's about to do another one.

gunnarre wrote:...The config setting (1-30 minutes) only applies to CPU projects (with exceptions?)...

AFAIK, there's no exceptions for CPU Projects using FahCore_a7 or FahCore_a8 but that doesn't mean it will not change in a future version of FahCore_a8