What are the "Only on Idle" thresholds?

[Lonewolf147]

Being able to set F@H to only run when idle is nice, and in the Advanced Control panel you can set the Folding Core Priority to 'slightly higher'. What are the idle thresholds to determine when F@H starts/pauses?

I run F@H on several computers. The one I'm most curious about is my unRaid server that hosts my Plex and other apps. I would like to have F@H run on idle there, but there is always a little computation going on in the background.

[Joe_H]

"On Idle" is supposed to be when user input such as from a keyboard or mouse is not happening. Exactly how that is detected depends on the OS. For Windows it would be when a screensaver is started or the screen turned off. On macOS it is supposed to be after no keyboard or similar input for a period of time. On linux it is when the same type of lack of user input is detected.

However a number of recent desktops/windowing setups for Linux don't set the idle status the same way and that status may not get picked up by the folding client. I recall someone posting on their investigation into this a while back, they ended up running a script or something that set the status variable for their system after a period of no user input. That was a while ago, I don't recall details of what exactly they did.

[Lonewolf147]

Thanks for the rundown on that. I'll look around and see if I can dig up something on that script.

[Lonewolf147]

BTW, I think this is the thread you were referring to: viewtopic.php?p=328173&hilit=on+idle+script#p328173

Another question, if I have F@H running high and while working, if any other app requests resources, does F@H reduce its own load on the CPU/GPU? I'd be fine just letting it run all the time if it let everything else have higher priority.

[Joe_H]

That topic looks like it could be the one I recalled, or at least similar.

The default installation is supposed to run F@h at the lowest priority, so other app requests should get their resources first. However changes in what various Linux distros support for handling background processes sometime change things. The installer was created initially years ago when it supported distros such as Ubuntu 14 through 18 and used init.d. The conversion to systemd scripts is sometimes not exact. There have been some posts on fixes to the created systemd setup.

[calxalot]

"Folding Core Priority" on v7 is broken. The cores are always priority idle.

Not to be confused with fold when idle, which is related to user idle.
The client does not measure system load in any way.

[calxalot]

Another question, if I have F@H running high and while working, if any other app requests resources, does F@H reduce its own load on the CPU/GPU? I'd be fine just letting it run all the time if it let everything else have higher priority.

The only way to know is to try it.
If you're only using half of available logical cpus (power light), most apps will be fine.
If other apps are trying to run low-priority background processes, there may be performance problems.

Games tend to not like it.
I've heard of slow opening/editing of files in video apps like Final Cut.

[calxalot]

Another thread with linux script workarounds for idle:
viewtopic.php?t=33351