Folding Forum

I shut my computer off each night and the work units for my CPU and Nvidia GPU are uncompleted. When I turn it back on the next day a new WU for my GPU has downloaded. Thus the work done the previous day is lost. It's an older GPU, an Nvidia GTX670 and the estimates for completing a WU run around 6-8 hours, longer than the amount of time I usually have the computer on. It also says "my computer has x days to complete the work unit" with x ranging 4-5 days. I assumed this meant a new WU would not be loaded until that time.

So I might as well disable the GPU processing, it's just a waste of power. Whaddya figure?

in the end it's your decision but I think there's more to the picture.

to me, this looks like data loss / corruption during your shutdown so upon reboot it has to get a new one, but only the logs will tell for sure. It is much safer to hit PAUSE on FAHControl and wait 30 seconds to give time for harddrive writes before shutting down. This means u have to hit FOLD again when u start up, but there's less chance of data loss this way.

EDIT: if it was me in your shoes, I'd complete a bunch more WUs by pausing before shutdown and keep a list of all work done and how long it took (whether less than or longer than 2 days. Because many of the GPU projects have a Timeout of 2 days, some greater (most CPU projects just 1 day). If any actually take longer for u to finish than 2 days (or 1 day for CPU), at the end of the week, I'd check those that took longer at https://apps.foldingathome.org/wu to see how many of them get completed by other people after you. (They are potentially reissued sometime after Timeout, but it depends). So depending on how much of your work gets completed by other ppl vs your cost of electricity, heat, noise... i think that'll give u a better picture if it's worth it for u. (and most ppl end up disabling CPU folding, but i think that's b/c of their personal points per cost/wattage analysis)

Ok, I'll do that for sure. You are probably right, the problem is likely caused by too quick of a shutdown.

I don't know what logs to look at. There are log files on my machine but I don't know which ones to use.

...which files to look at....

See the signature block below.

FAHClient V7.6.2x made some changes to this. Are you running 7.6.13 or earlier or are you running 7.6.2x? Did you accept the default settings or did you move some of FAH's files to non-standard locations?

How are you starting FAH when you reboot ... or when you pause?

I'm running 7.6.21 and it's in the default configuration. Pausing when shutting the computer down then unpausing after bootup seems to solve the problem. I pause/unpause from the dialog box that opens on the windows taskbar. There should be an option to have that happen automatically. It's too bad, last night I forgot to do that and lost 10 hours of work.

I would think there must be a significant number of users unaware of the necessity of pausing.

Don

xmitr wrote:So I might as well disable the GPU processing, it's just a waste of power. Whaddya figure?

I consider this a bug in the current version of FAHCore_22, but it's not clear what needs to be fixed. Assuming you use the built-in shutdown function in you OS rather than killing the power, the FAHCore needs a little time to close it's files rather than abandon them while data is still in the cache. As long as the OS notifies the FAHCore that a shut down is pending, it should initiate it's own clean shutdown process which is similar to what happens when you pause.

I use the OS shutdown function but apparently the process happens too quickly for the FAHcore to respond and save. So I have to manually Pause and wait some seconds.