Just joined the team & CPU running 50% on Intel dual-core

Started by nixie, November 03, 2011, 11:37:42 PM

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nixie

I was wondering if there was a setting in F@H to increase the amount of CPU to use?, as for both cores on my Intel Dual-Core are running at 50%. I was thinking about going into the PID and give it higher priority, but figured I'd check with the team to see if anyone knows a better way to do this. Pretty much when I am not using my system, I want it to be peddle to the metal in its number crunching vs right now coasting at 1/2 its potential. Looking at the advanced configuration options the arrow is set to 100% and it has options below for checkbox of Do Not Lock Cores to specific CPU ( whatever that is?) and Core Network Address Advanced (whatever that is?)

Way back with seti I think they had an option to have it run lesser processing when a user is active on it, but then after say 3 minutes of inactivity, it ramped up to 100% for crunching when a user didnt need the processing.

Looking in what was already posted here, I saw another person with a harmonic like CPU graph, mine is pretty steady without harmonics: http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php/topic,107716.0.html

Calcium wrote:
Quoteit looks like you're running the single core client on a multi core CPU, which will give about 50% CPU usage and each core will "bounce" up and down

Looking at F@H website I didn't see an option for single or multicore for any of the client downloads at: http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download

I Downloaded/Installed/Running v6.23:
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QuoteWindows XP/Vista/7/2003/2008
System tray (Systray) client installer with optional viewer

lectrocrew

Quote from: nixie on November 03, 2011, 11:37:42 PM
Looking at the advanced configuration options the arrow is set to 100% and it has options below for checkbox of Do Not Lock Cores to specific CPU ( whatever that is?) and Core Network Address Advanced (whatever that is?)

I Downloaded/Installed/Running v6.23:
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#1 Welcome to our F@H team.  :)

I'm fairly new and inexperienced with F@H but maybe I can help. I believe you are running a single core client on your dual core CPU, as Calcium posted.
I'm running v6.23 on my single core CPU machine and the advanced settings are as you described.
I'm running v7.1.24 multi-core SMP2 on my dual core laptop.
So - If you want to run both cores @ 100% then you'll need to - complete your current WU, then uninstall your current v6.23 client.
Then I'd suggest downloading the latest SMP multicore release v7.1.38. The v7 download page is here.
Click on the F@H banner under 'Download' then select your operating system ( the 1st listed for Windows - '•FAHClient v7.1.38 .exe - X86-32 Windows')
The Install Guide' 'Client User Guide' ect. can also be veiwed under 'Documentation'.
The SMP high performance FAQ page is here

If any of this info is incorrect someone please correct me.

Hope this helps, have fun!  ;)
Mike



nixie

Thanks for your help. I will finish the work unit and then uninstall and reinstall v7 from the provided link.


harry 48

You are both welcome to the team, i found the best place to get help is in the folding forum.

You can get a setup for single, double or as i have a quad core.

nixie

Thanks for help on this ... now able to crank out about 2 units a day on average on this single CPU.

harry 48

Quote from: nixie on November 14, 2011, 09:52:52 PM
Thanks for help on this ... now able to crank out about 2 units a day on average on this single CPU.

Your lucky  ;D

nixie

BTW I decided to put this on my quad-core vs dual-core... and even the F@H version 7 that supports all 4 cores wasn't stressing my system enough, so I am running a virtual XP Pro SP3 machine with 256MB Shared memory  and F@H 6.23 side-by-side my Windows 7 that has 4GB (256MB of it shared with the VM) Ram and it keeps it busy around 90% now and gets about 2 work units done a day on average. Some of the work has been smaller chunks though like 250 vs 750+, so if I am given larger work units it may go down to 1 per day.


lectrocrew

Quote from: nixie on November 15, 2011, 03:06:59 PM
BTW I decided to put this on my quad-core vs dual-core... and even the F@H version 7 that supports all 4 cores wasn't stressing my system enough, so I am running a virtual XP Pro SP3 machine with 256MB Shared memory  and F@H 6.23 side-by-side my Windows 7 that has 4GB (256MB of it shared with the VM) Ram and it keeps it busy around 90% now and gets about 2 work units done a day on average. Some of the work has been smaller chunks though like 250 vs 750+, so if I am given larger work units it may go down to 1 per day.
Yep, if larger work unit's are assigned then, of course, your WU count will be less but your points average/totals will be more. I look at the points as a reflection of the actual work done as opposed to WU's.
Keep up the good work!  ;)

jinjonBoo

Hey guys.
I just installed the latest F@H client (7.4.4 on Windows 7) on my laptop, which is a Intel Dual Core.
I put all settings to max and even so i get 50% on each core.. How can i boost up this thing to 100%???
Please help (checked all the previous posts but none of them resolve this issue)
Thanks

DaveLembke

Might be able to get it higher by going to task manager and changing the priority of the F@H service to be High vs Normal. Nixie was able to push the processor to the max via running virtual machines with F@H running in those virtual environments, this however while using more resources is not allocating say 100% to the F@H services between physical and virtual systems on same system as for resources are needed to run the virtual environment and so some CPU processing power is wasted just to be able to run two instances of F@H on the same system.

Another way this might be able to be done is to install F@H to 2 locations, and set one of them to manual service vs automatic. Then one of them auto starts to crunch and the other can be told to start manually and this way you can have 2 instances of the same F@H program running, and read/write of the data it is crunching in 2 isolated areas of the hard drive.

*** I'd be careful with pushing that laptop to 100% for long period of time though as for some older laptops were not the greatest for cooling and they would overheat after 100% processing power is used for a period of time. If this laptop is just solely going to be used to crunch data since mobile computing/crunching would eat the battery life up quickly, you could always get one of those USB powered cooling pads to place under it to add more airflow to the hot underside of the laptop.

From my experience with F@H and SETI etc, mobile processors dont run it as well as desktop processors mainly because they are lower wattage/slower processors that are designed to run cooler than a desktop CPU. However this is a comparison among like age hardware as for a Core i7 laptop would crunch quickly what a Pentium D desktop could achieve in a 24 hr period. If you had tested a Core i7 mobile and Core i7 desktop computer of same clock etc you would find that the mobile processor would lag behind in performance to that of the desktop CPU.

Calum

F@H should use 100% of the CPU, no need to run virtual machines or two clients.

Could you post a screenshot of your main F@H window, please, so we can see what's currently going on?

Edit: also, welcome to the forums and to the team :)