Donor Statistics

[Bob_6591]

Hello

Started folding a few days ago. My initial rank was 2,976,668 out of 2,976,668. Two or three days later it was 371,711 out of 2,976,745. I am both puzzled and disturbed by the numbers. At the very least I thought it would take a few weeks to get under 2,000,000. Apparently not.

The numbers suggest that 80-90% of the people never get past a few work units. Does anyone know why people drop out so fast?

Thanks.

[BobWilliams757]

Hardware advances have fueled most of the numbers you see. You have to keep in mind that F@H is over 20 years old, and initial work units produced less than a point. Even those that spent top dollar on hardware weren't producing many points, even if they folded 24/7.

These days even gear considered obsolete in most uses can produce 100K or more PPD. Onboard integrated GPU's can produce near the same levels.

For a couple hundred dollars a person can now produce 1 million or more points per day. For a couple hundred more several millions per day.


Your climb through the ranks will slow every day, and as you near those making about the same PPD it will become much slower to move upwards in the ranks usually. You are just currently in an area where you are competing with very few people. Many are probably not even alive any longer, and even those with equal gear may have several years or more jump in when they started.

So many people DID do a lot more work units, just with much slower gear than we have now. And many drop out for various reasons, currently there are only 18 thousand or so active folders. In reality it's a small number of people, and all the more reason why every contribution helps.

Just keep folding, and thanks for contributing.

[Bob_6591]

Thanks for the reply. I did not realize people can now get a massive amount of points for just a few units.

[BobWilliams757]

You have new enough gear that if you fold 24/7 you can produce more points than most folders, but the crazy thing is as you go through the ranks you have to catch up to others producing at the same level.... so you don't. You eventually pass others going slower, but some of them have been folding so long that even if they had slower gear, it's a lot of heard start to catch up with.

All kinds of folding stats can also be seen at https://folding.extremeoverclocking.c ... .php?s=

That can show you the bigger picture about how few people actually fold, long term numbers, etc.

[Bob_6591]

Thanks for the link. The stats are very interesting. One could spend hours looking at the stats. Or maybe not.

Has F@H every tried to survey users as to why they stopped folding (few months or year later)?

One issue I faced when starting to fold was that my fans sounded as if the computers were going to take off. That was at medium settings. I was able to get things sorted after a few days. It took a fair amount of work. Do the high noise levels stop people from folding? Is there a better place on the forum to discuss this?

[BobWilliams757]

I'm not sure if F@H has ever done a survey on users, but years back there was a paper on the statistics of the types of people that fold. I think part of the problem would be if people have quit folding (regardless of the reason) then they might not see or respond to a survey on why they quit. But their may be ways around that, hard to say.

As for noise levels, usually it's just fan curves not tuned for specific needs. For some people this might be an issue, but I think often folders are more the tech types that play with these things already. This will also vary a lot system to system depending on the case, number of fans, hardware specifics that contribute to heat, etc. This is one of the reasons that factory presets and Windows system settings often fail in this regard. If you have specific questions or hassles it might be best to post a new thread in the "FAH Hardware" section.