Folding Forum

Hi there,
Just upgraded to my P67 machine and its going great. Got a question/suggestion regarding the sequence of WU up- and downloads. The problem is that where I am the ADSL connections are still expensive, leaving me with a reasonably priced 384k line. This causes rather slow uploads of completed units, especially the 6701 and 6702 units. The time lapse is about 1 hour between one of those finishing and the next unit being downloaded. When I complete two of these in a day, that means 2 hours CPU idle time.
Is there any way that the program can be amended so that as soon as a WU is complete, the next action is a download of a WU allowing it to start, and then starting the upload of the finished WU. It would improve efficiencies for all, and especially for people with slow connections. I trust you can investigate the possibility.
Just for other users info. My P67 with i7-2600K @ 4,5GHz and a GTX460@880/1760 seems to be averaging out at 30k PPD. My total power consumption for this set-up is ~330W.

Welcome to foldingforum.org, ZSDE.

This enhancement has been recommended by a number of people. At this point, no improvements are planned for V6, but V7 will be available "soon" (that's a forum insider term which is never defined because nobody can predict when something will be ready for release). There's a good chance that features like that might be included in V7, but nobody is in a position to promise anything.

If you happen to be around when a WU is expected to finish, you can interrupt the client immediately after the upload starts. When you restarting the client, a new WU will download and start concurrently with the upload of the finished WU. By the time the upload finishes, you'll have gotten a pretty good start on the new assignment.

Thanks for the tip bruce. I will do that when I am there, which is usually only after hours.
That machine runs dedicated 24/7 and is usually left alone.

Yet another option is setting up a 3rd party utility called Langouste. Haven't tried it myself, though.

ZSDE: congrats on the P67 setup, they are great!

From the return time on your WU, sounds like you are doing SMP? Have you considered bigadv? I have a i7-2600k going at about 4.3GHz, it does a bigadv WU about every 2.5 days. That would reduce the frequency of your transfers, but maybe the transfers are bigger, so no advantage? It would probably increase your ppd to 45000.

Thanks Napolean, for mentioning Langouste. I had a similar idea (maybe run -oneunit, and launch a new fah when CPU drops below 80%?), but hadn't tried to code it. Nice to know that someone has already got it working.

Have you thought of using more than one client and scheduling them to start when the other is finishing? Using the -oneunit flag would cause the finished client to close while the operating client would chug on. I run bigadv on my 2600k @ 4.5ghz. It produces about 42k ppd and 34k ppd when I run my gtx570.

Napoleon wrote:Yet another option is setting up a 3rd party utility called Langouste. Haven't tried it myself, though.

I use it, works very well. Means my downtime of about 20 mins between units is now about 3 mins. For the original poster it would seem a must.