Folding Forum

I've been Folding for many years on Windows PC's via the desktop (app?) but yesterday it stopped.D/loaded the current version but it runs in my Firefox browser with no option to switch to my old,preferred, way. Is this the future??

Thanks for any answers.

If you mean the advanced control app FAHControl, that is not a part of the version 8 client. The client app itself still runs in the background like it did for v7. Pretty much anything you could do with FAHControl can now be done through the v8 Web Control used in a browser, unlike the v7 Web Control. There are no plans to provide a separate app for monitoring and controlling the client.

In theory your installation of the v7 client should have continued to work. It is possible something got messed up or there was a temporary lack of work for your system configuration.

I tried 8.4.9 and unfortunately "pretty much everything" doesn't seem to cover some of the things I do with settings in 7.6.1 and Windows 10 and now 11, so I reinstalled 7.6.21 from downloaded installation files, and if it disappears or becomes dysfunctional I may have to quit. However, it may help if I list the things I want and someone could say whether or not, and if so how, they can be done with 8.4.9.

Pause-on-start = true [Because I want to be able to fire up a device without Fah grabbing it immediately]
Max-packet-size=small [Accidentally useful in preventing Project 18251 jobs that ran badly on my RTX 2060s]
Next-unit-percentage=100 [useful if folding on CPU and +GPU, could do without this one since I decided not to.]

There is also (and most importantly) the need to use the Lars "Folding in the Dark" timer to limit folding to off-peak electricity rate times. The 8.4.x version doesn't seem to have a timer (yet?)

Many of these features are under consideration already, but the limited dev time, and the primary dev dividing his time among the client, core, and server code, means that the client isn't getting as much love as it deserves.

appepi wrote: ↑Tue Jun 24, 2025 11:51 pm Pause-on-start = true [Because I want to be able to fire up a device without Fah grabbing it immediately]

https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-cl ... issues/360

appepi wrote: ↑Tue Jun 24, 2025 11:51 pm Max-packet-size=small [Accidentally useful in preventing Project 18251 jobs that ran badly on my RTX 2060s]

I don't think this is possible. The v8 API does not support that, so the client has no way to tell the server anything about its desired projects. If the 18251 works very badly on a 2060, then you can post about that and perhaps the 18251 species restrictions can be changed to exclude that GPU.

I could also make a PR to add blacklist support in the client, but it probably won't get merged because some people might use it to try to game the system (e.g. blacklisting all but the highest PPD projects to earn more points at the expense of wasted server load).

appepi wrote: ↑Tue Jun 24, 2025 11:51 pm Next-unit-percentage=100 [useful if folding on CPU and +GPU, could do without this one since I decided not to.]

https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-cl ... issues/326

appepi wrote: ↑Tue Jun 24, 2025 11:51 pm There is also (and most importantly) the need to use the Lars "Folding in the Dark" timer to limit folding to off-peak electricity rate times. The 8.4.x version doesn't seem to have a timer (yet?)

https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah-we ... /issues/53

But scheduling folding is easy because it runs as a service, and there are a million ways to schedule services. On a systemd distro, you can set times where services start and stop. You can also make a simple cron job that runs "fahctl pause" and "fahctl fold" at certain times of day.

Next-unit-percentage=100 [useful if folding on CPU and +GPU, could do without this one since I decided not to.]

The default for v7 was to download at 99%, this option was useful for those with fast connections. But it only saved a few seconds compared to how the v8 client does downloads. The v8 client starts a download as soon as it finishes packing up the completed WU and starts uploading it. That also avoids a race condition in the v7 client where it could download a WU before the packing up was completed and the system crashed or was shutdown in the middle of that. The previous WU might sit waiting to be processed from its last checkpoint while the new WU started up.