Folding Forum

The stats page, https://stats.foldingathome.org/os, shows the current computing power of FAH. The Internet Archive only has stats starting at 2018, which shows a significant in activity compared to the current statistics. It makes sense that there would be a temporary increase in folding during COVID and a subsequent sharp decrease as new folders' motivations wane, but 2018 was before COVID. Unfortunately, I can't find any archives before 2018, so I can't really see if there's a trend of declining popularity or if it's normal to have very large changes in number of folders. Is there anywhere that historical FLOPS data or activity data is kept, or anything else which can be used to assess the health and vitality of the project?

No info kept.
Decline is usually due to people moving on with their lives, as well as receiving first power bill. That's what happened during COVID too. Everyone was like kumbaya the first month, and then power bills started coming in and everyone just ran away
And with cost of living going through the roof every year people just cannot afford to participate in projects like that.
There is never a trend

Historical data older than 2018 would be from the site based at Stanford and Dr. Pande's lab. After he took a job in a private company the lab was wound down as his grad students completed their research and degrees. What is available may depend on the search settings for the spiders on that site.

Try searching folding.stanford.edu for what is available.

arisu wrote: ↑Wed Mar 19, 2025 1:18 pm The stats page, https://stats.foldingathome.org/os, shows the current computing power of FAH. The Internet Archive only has stats starting at 2018, which shows a significant in activity compared to the current statistics. It makes sense that there would be a temporary increase in folding during COVID and a subsequent sharp decrease as new folders' motivations wane, but 2018 was before COVID. Unfortunately, I can't find any archives before 2018, so I can't really see if there's a trend of declining popularity or if it's normal to have very large changes in number of folders. Is there anywhere that historical FLOPS data or activity data is kept, or anything else which can be used to assess the health and vitality of the project?

You might have better luck searching for archives of EOC stats pages.

https://folding.extremeoverclocking. ... p?s=

They have points going back to 2013, and from there you could roughly calculate TFLOPS over the yearly average. Since they also have stats on active users, you might be able to find that trend as well. Keep in mind that on that page an "active user" only has to complete one work unit per week, so they are far from power folders.

Through the charts only go back a few years, you can see the end of the COVID era downturn in active users still on the charts. Since then the average of active users has stayed mostly in the 8-12K range. There really aren't that many active folders, and as you can see if you check out that site, many are using very minimal older hardware.