Folding @ Home F.A.Q.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by pscout

If the client doesn't get restarted once in a while the fahlog.txt will just keep growing. the verbosity 9 flag makes it worse since more is written to the log.

The fahlog gets pruned once it get past ~ 50 K and the most recent is moved to fahlog-prev.txt .... but this only happens once when the client is started.

But I dunno how you could have filled that much of a log with only 22 wu's tho. The beta does have problems deleting files from the work directory. The biggest fahlog.txt I ever recall having seen was one of my gpu clients that produced ~1000 eue's in less than a day and it was only 1-2 MB.

Yeah I was shocked!!!!!

My HD's only 80 gig on this rig, and it was filling up half of my space!!! At first I thought I was reading the file size wrong, but when I deleted the file my HD went back to being only half full so it was definately the log file that was the culprit.

I don't know if it got stuck in some kind of reporting loop that filled it up quickly or what..... It's on my laptop and it wouldn't be more than three days since it was turned off.

I dropped a note over in the "bugs for all OS" forum to see if anybody had seen this before

[sswilson]

Not the first time something like this has been reported.......

Folding-community.org :: View topic - HUGE FAHlog file

Not sure if I buy the "corrupted file" theory, but either way deleting it seems to be the answer.

[pscout]

Originally Posted by sswilson

Not the first time something like this has been reported.......

Folding-community.org :: View topic - HUGE FAHlog file

Not sure if I buy the "corrupted file" theory, but either way deleting it seems to be the answer.

Ya i noticed your post after i posted here.

I didn't think to ask which client you were running.

But I would suggest moving to the standard 5.04 client. The gui 5.03 seems to be nothing but trouble over the long haul. Standard clients have a lot less to go wrong with them .... virtually no interaction with the windows gui, open g/l etc, no support for screen saver mode etc etc.

You can move a wu in progress on the gui to a standard client. Just copy the work dir and queue.dat file to a new folder for the standard client and uninstall the gui one. When the standard client starts up it will find the wu, download a new core for it and pick up from the last checkpoint. If you want it to run automatically and invisibly, just set it up as a service in the config setup. I keep mine on the desktop for my dedicated folding rigs since it makes it easier to stop/start and check on, but on a rig used by others, service is a better option. Don't forget the battery option in config so it doesn't drain your battery when not on ac.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by pscout

Ya i noticed your post after i posted here.

I didn't think to ask which client you were running.

But I would suggest moving to the standard 5.04 client. The gui 5.03 seems to be nothing but trouble over the long haul. Standard clients have a lot less to go wrong with them .... virtually no interaction with the windows gui, open g/l etc, no support for screen saver mode etc etc.

You can move a wu in progress on the gui to a standard client. Just copy the work dir and queue.dat file to a new folder for the standard client and uninstall the gui one. When the standard client starts up it will find the wu, download a new core for it and pick up from the last checkpoint. If you want it to run automatically and invisibly, just set it up as a service in the config setup. I keep mine on the desktop for my dedicated folding rigs since it makes it easier to stop/start and check on, but on a rig used by others, service is a better option. Don't forget the battery option in config so it doesn't drain your battery when not on ac.

Sounds like a plan.

This WU is going to finish in 6 hours so I'll just dump it after it finishes it and install the standard non-gui as a service.

Battery life isn't an issue as this laptop was bought as a "desktop replacement" and as such doesn't really have enough battery life to be much use without the AC..... :)

On another note.... I noticed we just got Gav's first WU. :)

[sswilson]

I just remembered that this laptop is only set up with 512 mem.....

What's the recommended cut-off for mem size when using the large file size setting?

[pscout]

512 mb should get you any available single core wu. Not sure these days how big they usaully are since i have not been tracking/running too many standard clients, but I have not heard of any problems from other folders running 512mb with a single instance. However most of the discussions I follow are smp related.

Looking thru the server status page, there are only a few servers that seem to have wu's needing mem size of 512 or more. There are easy links to the psummary and server stats from the web tab on fahmon.

You can have a look at perf mgr memory size by process to see what is in use by the core. I would be suprised if any of the big packets/advmethods wu's would require much over 300 mb and i would guess most would be < 200 MB. So unless the rig is doing much outside of folding it should be ok.

If a lot of windows are open browsing you might notice some slowdown due to paging if you did get a 300+ mb wu. Speed of hard drive on a lappy could also exacerbate paging performance.

a little off topic, but somewhat related ... I have noticed that i seem to use a lot more windows lately with firefox following multiple reading/research threads. And it will noticeably slow down smp perf on a 1 gb 930d @ 4.2 after a while although the rig is still responsive to the gui. I don't notice it as much when i use my main work rig which is a 6600 with 2 gb. A nice feature of firefox tho is to kill it in task manager so it is like a hard boot and the next time you launch it it will ask if you want all the windows relaunched. So after killing it it goes to 0 but then i can resume where i left off the next day or whenever. If i leave all the windows open firefox sometimes continues to chew 2-9% even when minimized, maybe due to the java engine? I should try out ie7 to see if it behaves any better but i have avoided it so far.

[sswilson]

Just a quick word to those starting out, or those (like me) who need to re-install the beta SMP Client......

Don't (like me..... ) forget to run the "install.bat" after you extract it into the programs folder...............

You'll spend hours trying to figure out why the core won't run............ :)

[pscout]

If you just replace the 2 files that were changed you don't need to re-run the install.bat. But you would have needed to run the self installer in another directory to do this.

The install.bat can be rerun at any time as long as the client isn't running. You may need to do this in some cases where the client gets screwed up ( a beta bug) and somehow mpiexec gets unregistered.

[Jordan]

Just installed Folding@Home SMP on one of my C2D machines, I should appear on the team list as "JordanE" soon :).

[DurkaDurka]

I installed F@H on my core 2 pc, under the name DurkaDurka. Entered the team# as well