Assign Wait

[calxalot]

There is a portion of the site on github, but nobody is maintaining it and I don’t think changes would automatically make it to live.

Can’t find it right now.
I made a PR for macOS uninstall years ago and it was ignored.

[Joe_H]

The person who had maintained the support pages passed away about the same time F@h was in transition from being lead by Dr. Pande, and the servers being moved off from computers at Stanford. There was no formal replacement as to who would update the support pages, and parts of the site were moved in a way that leads me to believe it might have been recovered from an older backup or one of the internet archive sites.

Since then most of the changes have been done by Joseph by default as developer. From what I have seen it is not the highest priority part of his job after server and client coding.

[arisu]

The person who had maintained the support pages passed away about the same time F@h was in transition from being lead by Dr. Pande, and the servers being moved off from computers at Stanford. There was no formal replacement as to who would update the support pages, and parts of the site were moved in a way that leads me to believe it might have been recovered from an older backup or one of the internet archive sites.

Since then most of the changes have been done by Joseph by default as developer. From what I have seen it is not the highest priority part of his job after server and client coding.

Is there any data on how much of a problem that is for new users? I found that it's hard to even download FAH because there's no easy download link, just a confusing link to "past releases" which actually contains the current releases, buried under several confusingly-named (for most people) subdirectories.

[Joe_H]

The regular download page - https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/ - for the current client attempts to run a script and detect which OS you are running. When it works properly, it leads off with the link for your OS and then shows the links for the other three OS downloads. Currently that is macOS, Windows, Linux (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) for 64bit Intel/AMD or ARM. Only at the bottom does it show a link to past releases. I have heard of the page not detecting the OS, but never seen that myself, so am not familiar with what the page defaults to.

https://foldingathome.org/download will redirect to the "start-folding" page. https://foldingathome.org/beta/ again uses the OS detect script and I don't know what its default is if an OS is not detected.

The "past releases" link layout is not a problem to me, but that comes from it looking a lot like an FTP site. That was a common download layout in the past. My computer experience dates back over 50 years, so it is familiar to me. But at some point hopefully they get someone who can redo the whole support area. During COVID they got website pros who volunteered to update the lead pages, but it didn't get into the support pages much.

How much of a problem it is for new users I haven't seen any quantitive data. But it does confuse some from what gets posted here. There may be more posts on the discord, but I don't have the time to also follow that.

[arisu]

Oops, didn't even think that it might be detecting the OS.

That makes more sense. The other usability issues are still a problem though. Just 30 seconds ago I answered a question from yet another user who was confused about the "no appropriate assignment" message. It would be useful to know how many people attempt to download or use FAH and then give up right away.

[arisu]

The FAQs link is fixed now looks like. Though I was not the first to notice that it was a dead link: viewtopic.php?p=308122#p308122

[muziqaz]

The FAQs link is fixed now looks like. Though I was not the first to notice that it was a dead link: viewtopic.php?p=308122#p308122

You see, we listen from time to time

[fangfufu]

I just want to say I have a i7-8700K, and I folded with two threads to reduce the amount of noise. It is a bit annoying that 2-thread machines are no longer allowed to fold.

[arisu]

I just want to say I have a i7-8700K, and I folded with two threads to reduce the amount of noise. It is a bit annoying that 2-thread machines are no longer allowed to fold.

Two-thread machines are only disallowed, temporarily I believe, due to a bug. Muziqaz can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I think they will eventually be re-enabled.

In the meantime, you can always specify three threads, then change it to two once the WU has downloaded. Alternatively you could specify three threads and then cap the maximum CPU usage with a third party utility. On Linux, you can use cpusets for this. I don't know about Windows. You could also fold on three+ cores but just cap the maximum CPU speed.

Ironically, sometimes folding on one or two threads actually increases noise if it enables single-core turboboost which is much higher than all-core turboboost.

[fangfufu]

Well, it turns out that my GTX 1080 is operating within acceptable noise limit. I don't think my wallet is too happy though.

I did try 3 threads, I still had difficulty with getting WU with 3 threads.

[fangfufu]

Anyways, do let me know when 2 threads assignment is allowed again. I want to save some cash. haha.

[fangfufu]

For anyone else is reading this, after setting it to 3 threads, and restarting the client, I finally got a WU assigned. Finally I can have my quiet PC...

[arisu]

GPU folding is much more efficient than CPU folding. For the same electrical costs, it gets much more science done. You can adjust the power limit for the 1080 to reduce the electrical costs. In fact you can often reduce it substantially (like 20%) with only minimal reduction in folding speed.

The GTX 1080 gets around 1.4M PPD. That's a lot. Now let's say running two CPU cores gives you 50k PPD. In one day, your GTX 1080 will have made as much progress as the two CPU cores make in an entire month! That's how much more efficient GPU folding is than CPU folding.

The GTX 1080 uses a maximum of 180 watts. If you wanted to reduce the maximum power draw to 140 watts to save power, you would run this command:

Code: Select all

sudo nvidia-smi -pl 140