Best way to take advantage of P3 1GHz folders?

lemonlime

Hi All,

I have five P3 1GHz machines and a P3 800MHz folding away and their production is terrible. I'm just wondering how to best take advantage of them? Any recommended client.cfg configurations? I set them to deadlineless WUs, but they take almost six days to fold a simple 241 point tinker WU. Some have 256MB and a couple have 512MB of RAM I believe.

Straight_Man

Which Windows??? XP can use 256 RAM and do nothing else major like folding without swapping stuff to HD a LOT. 2000 likes 256 ideally for itself also.

Windows 98 uses less RAM, so rather than telling you to up the RAM to max machines will hold up to a Gig if XP or 3/4 Gig if 98 SE, I'm tempted to tell you to use 98 SE on them.

6 days is a bit much for those Tinkers, I would expect 3-4-1/2 days more normally for the 1 GHz machines with lots of RAM. Took my 3+ GHz P4 box about 24 hours on a 241 pt Tinker, just for perspective.

EDIT\ADD: Oh, also:

Set the time that completion points are saved to maximum (30 minutes), less time will be spent saving data in the midst of folding (core pauses folding to write completion points). And, if you can, run a non-graphical console client to unload the CPU even more from gening graphics (Which take time on CPU ticks to gen).

lemonlime

Straight_Man wrote:

Which Windows??? XP can use 256 RAM and do nothing else major like folding without swapping stuff to HD a LOT. 2000 likes 256 ideally for itself also.

Windows 98 uses less RAM, so rather than telling you to up the RAM to max machines will hold up to a Gig if XP or 3/4 Gig if 98 SE, I'm tempted to tell you to use 98 SE on them.

6 days is a bit much for those Tinkers, I would expect 3-4-1/2 days more normally for the 1 GHz machines with lots of RAM. Took my 3+ GHz P4 box about 24 hours on a 241 pt Tinker, just for perspective.

EDIT\ADD: Oh, also:

Set the time that completion points are saved to maximum (30 minutes), less time will be spent saving data in the midst of folding (core pauses folding to write completion points). And, if you can, run a non-graphical console client to unload the CPU even more from gening graphics (Which take time on CPU ticks to gen).

Thanks for the tips.. I'll definitely try that checkpoint setting.. They are running a trimmed down Windows 2000 build and have a reasonable amount of free memory (plenty for tinkers and most small-medium sized WUs). They need to be running at minimum 2K for their other purposes. I'm already using the non-graphical console.

I'm not sure if Tinker WUs are the best to be feeding PIIIs.. anyone have any other suggestions? Even my 2.3G Sempron does a tinker frame in about 4 minutes, compared to 18 minutes on these P3's..

GrayFox

Make them linux folders there will be a small proformence increese.

edit: As long as you don't run xserver.

BuddyJ

You should take them out, buy them drinks to lower their defences and then make your move...

No, the right way to take advantage of them is to go for what GrayFox said and make them dedicated linux rigs. SM_24 runs as a Gentoo console and does just dandy. I have Enlightenment on there, but 99 percent of the time, it's not running xserve.

profdlp

I've got a Slot1 PIII 1000 here that has been averaging just a hair under 400ppw on the timeless Tinkers. I'm considering going back to potluck WU's with it and see how it does with the occasional Gromac. (It's running WinXP with 512MB of RAM.)

If that shows no improvement it's going to be time for prime's Folding on Linux newbie guide.