Folding Forum

Hi everyone,

I started folding in march with cpu only later discovered gpu folding, and had problems from beginning that active folding slows down firefox, libre office writer & calc. I switched to chromium and stopped the folding when using libre office. Since yesterday even chromium is very slow in reacting, watching movies with vlc became impossible. I searched around but couldn't find proper help.

I run a Thinkpad P71 workstation with an intel xeon E3 1535 M V 6 with 8 cores and a nvidia P4000 mobile GPU on Lubuntu 18.04 with Cuda 11 installed.
The slowdown is so bad, that I have to stop GPU folding in order to be able to work, which is quite sad.

Any ideas, how to keep my laptop usable while the gpu is folding?

FAH is designed to maximize it's performance using low-priority CPU resoures. It really can't manage GPU resources since there are no priority settings associated with GPU work.

Cooling on laptops is often under-designed and CUDA does (too) good a job of exploit those characterisic.
Options to be tested.
1) Disable CUDA processing. The OpenCL code will run slower but generate less heat. Does that solve your problem?
2) Reconfigure the GPU to run only when idle. That will suspend GPU processing when your mouse/keyboard are in use (depending on your OS) further reducing heat. It can still do GPU processing overnight.
3) If all else fails, don't fold with your GPU

Before you do any of these things, be sure you clean the dust out of the cooling passages and confirm that the fan works. If your fan runs continuously, it's likely to only last a year but it can be replaced/(upgraded?)

I found that when I enabled hardware accelerated graphics in Firefox and Chromium on Linux, I could watch videos in the browsers at the same time as I'm folding. Without hardware accellerated graphics, I couldn't watch videos in the browser while folding.

Here's how to enable hardware accelleration in Firefox - it is off by default: https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/ ... in-firefox

Chrome/Chromium recently made some changes to its hardware accellerated graphics, so maybe something has to be changed in the Chromium settings again?

Are you CPU folding at the same time as the GPU? In that case, it migt be a good idea to reduce the number of CPU threads to 4, or disable CPU folding completely. I found that some games became sluggish when I folded on all-1 CPU threads and the GPU at the same time. Performance was regained by reducing the number of CPU threads.

Edit: If there's a choice between folding only on the GPU or only on the CPU it is usually better to fold only on the GPU. But as Bruce says, GPU scheduling is usually just first-in-first-out without any real prioritizaion, so you might find that you'll have to disable GPU folding. Try the hardware accelleration and GPU-folding only first though, because both of those helped fixed my problem, so I'm GPU folding on Linux just fine now.