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I spent all day stopping and restarting the client, removing the slot client, adding a new slot client, still the same problem. This morning, with a project 8001 taking 18 hours to reach 25%, I decided to drop back the number of cores from the default "-1" auto select to a manually selected 3 cores. Now, I am running a PhenomII X4 945 at stock settings, so I only have 4 cores to work with and GPU folding seems to take almost an entire core to its self. I thought dropping it down from attempting to run all 4 cores to only running 3 would slow me down and/or drop my PPD.
Nope.
I am now blazing through the previously sluggish WU at around 3:51 TPF. Is this a problem that other people have run into? I was not having an issue until yesterday and I wonder if its something wrong with my client, the WU or did I successfully resolve an actual issue with load?
I did a little search and found that Beta drivers could cause this ...so if anyone else has had experience with this please chime in. Also, if you're having this issue it may be worth a shot to fall back to non-beta drivers. I'll let you know after I turn in a few successful wu's.
Link to FF
Link to download page
Install notes: I told the installer to keep the old config, installed right on top of the older client, it is running smooth. Installer ran an uninstall routine before updating, but kept WU in progress and resumed it from checkpoint. Only thing I do not like, is that it ran the FAHControl, and FAHControl ended up running in a window almost totally over the window that informed me the install was complete. The completion window was not quite covered, the top bar was visible, so I brought the installer window to front and closed the installer.
So, I invested $20.00 in another 4 GB stick. And after that, average PPD all other things being equal jumped 2-10 K a day depending on what WUs I got. For my numbers, that is about 12-30% gain in PPD from a minimal investment.
The client sets up what the core is fed unless I am wrong, and how it is fed, so if the Client will grab lots of RAM and feed the core a whole chunk of work (read large chunk) from RAM, that is faster than from temp files on HD. With SMP, I am (I think) running 8 core equivalents simultaneously.
So, RAM for eight core instances plus a chunk of work for each, plus maybe the whole WU in RAM if the client is set up right and that much RAM is available for actual use. Else why have the client report what the system RAM is??? And why do those systems with large RAM outperform otherwise essentially same system with low RAM, or slower RAM???
The SMP core (what is actually doing the work) is only using ~178MB of RAM and the GPU2 cores are at 73MB each. The clients are at ~1MB each and the overall program (FAHControl, in your case, FAH GPU Tracker in mine) is at 29MB. Total memory hit: 356MB.
My main rig, which I run -adv and -big (which you should be for SMP) WUs is around the same total hit.
As to why you got a points increase, who knows. Maybe it was getting sent to swap when you were doing other things and now it doesn't. Faster RAM would feed the processor faster, but I don't know how much of a bottleneck that is and don't have the will power to test it out on my rigs (gotta keep folding :P). You are correct in stating that the client is what talks to the server (giving it stats about the machine on which it is running and pulling/pushing WUs) and then engages the core to do the work.
However, EOC stats is guesstimating that I will hit a million points about April 1st-2nd. Started with zero points Feb 4. Same single dedicated Folding box the whole time. :D I have been getting consistently more for about 10 days now, in the range specified. So either the client and cores and other stuff were in swap for 22 days and ten days ago (when I increased the RAM) stopped being in swap, or something really weird happened.