Folding Forum

I've suddenly noticed (in about the last week), half the tasks are taking twice as long to run (even though my GPUs seem to be just as heavily utilised), yet the timeout is the same. My poor old GPUs are only just meeting the first deadline. Is this a shift to wanting people with faster GPUs?

No, it's just how FAH works. The mix of projects always changes as some are completed and others are created.

Odd, they've been pretty much 7 hours on all my cards for months. The odd double length one had a correspondingly longer deadline. But this lot don't. I guess someone submitted a lot of jobs with the wrong time guess.

That is a function of how they are assigned, and where your card(s) lie within a species assignment, along with whatever factors in how broad a brush they assign them to for them to complete in the desired time.

If your GPU's are on the lower end of the assignment, they might not have much extra time. If your GPU's fall towards the higher performance portion of the assignment, they could finish with plenty of time in reserve.

With my current GPU I've had projects from under one hour up to 11 or so hours. Unless your GPU won't make deadlines there is no concern. If your GPU won't make deadlines, reporting it with specifics of GPU type, project, etc might be helpful so they can alter assignments if needed.

I see, so what you're saying is the tasks you do in under 1 hour, they don't need back in under 1 hour, so they give you the same 1 day deadline, to allow for people turning their computer off or playing games.

On that note, isn't the "fold only when computer is not in use" option screwing things up? Machines with that set must miss most of the deadlines. Or does it learn how often the machine runs folding?

12 of my GPUs are R9 280X. They take 7 hours, and recently some are 14 hours.
I have one R9 Nano which is twice as fast, but it gets the same lot of tasks, doing them in 4 or 8 hours.
Perhaps both those card types are classed as fastest on the scale, and so is yours, hence the 1 hour tasks. Perhaps anything which can finish a big task in 1 day is called fast.

I have one RX 560. It's half the speed of the 280X cards. I used to not run it on folding because it never completed them by the first deadline. But now it does. It gets given tasks with 3 day deadlines, I guess someone changed something.

Where do I report a card being too slow if it were to happen again?

I'm not quite sure how the people involved determine the details of folding time expected, but in some cases the variety of hardware makes it hard regardless. As for cards that used to time out not doing so lately, I think @musiqaz and possibly others were involved in breaking down the species categories much better for AMD GPU's. But it's a constant thing, so the volunteers that do most of it can only do what they can do.


And I'd think if you have a GPU that won't make time outs, reporting it under the "problems with a specific WU" section would hopefully let those that make the decisions know if it's a species category issue, isolated issue, or simply an assignment issue. Human will make mistakes, and at times it's going to happen. Usually it's not a problem unless it's happening more often to more people, since there will always be things that slip through a crack here and there.