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I'm looking for a little insight here or suggestion on what I can do about this situation.

My daily driver at work is a e6300 at stock speeds with 2GB RAM running Windows Vista 32bit. Since this is my main computer it's under a moderate load from me for about 9 hours per day but other 15 hours per day it's otherwise idle. I have the Windows SMP Client Version 5.91 beta6 running as a service. It's currently chewing on a project 3050 unit and, according to FaHMon, it's going to miss the final deadline by about 5.5 hours. It's taking roughly 35 minutes per percent completed.

Why do yo think it's going to miss the deadline? Is it my use of the computer during the work day that's killing it? Since I'm new to folding any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

That's a fairly low end CPU. 35 min/step may be the best it can do. Review the min/step during the night and compare it to your daytime min/step to see if your work is slowing SMP down.

Can you overclock it? That CPU should be good for 2,8GHZ I would think. It being a work PC the answer is probably no.

You may need to load up the graphical client.

Personally, I just run 2 command line clients on my E6300. I don't particularly have an interest in overclocking it since it is my mother's normal use computer and borging it for the cause is enough without playing with OCing a system that was spec'd (memory and motherboard) for budget.

It looks like until about 14:15 GMT it was running about 21 minutes per percent then it plummeted to about 35 per percent thereafter. With daylight savings do you subtract 8 or 9 hours to get to Pacific time? That would put that performance shift at about 5am to 6am pacific time and I don't get in to the office until 7am. Hrmmm.

Unfortunately the work PC is an HP and does not provide any means of overclocking it or I might try it

How would the graphical client provide me with a benefit over what I'm running now?

First try stopping and restarting the client which might get you back to 21mins per percent, although it might just be a rough section of the WU or some extra load on your system. Are there any processes or services you can shutdown? Are there any scheduled programs that run at night? And it is Windoz .. when in doubt .. restart.

Those 30xx WUs from "densign" generally produce poorer PPD and have tighter deadlines than the 26xx WUs from "kasson". One would think the PPD are coming out of densign's pocket.

You could try adding the '-advmethods' flag or removing it for a possible better chance of getting 26xx WUs. Although the advantage tends to flip back and forth from time to time.

If you have a way to block IP addresses, you could block the 30xx server and make it keep trying until it gets a 26xx WU. Although this is usually called "cherry picking" and is generally frowned upon.

Dang, I stopped and restarted the the client as you suggested but about 18 minutes later boom:

[23:21:25] CoreStatus = 7B (123)
[23:21:25] Client-core communications error: ERROR 0x7b
[23:21:25] Deleting current work unit & continuing...

Ugg. Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise tough. I was likely to miss the final deadline on the 3050 anyway and it downloaded a 2653 to munch on. The PC is currently running at about 24 minutes per percent on the 2653.

I never did hear why the graphical client may be an advantage over the SMP service client?

Just for the timeouts. The WU's on the standard client tend to have much longer deadlines than those on the SMP client.

adampk17 wrote:

Dang, I stopped and restarted the the client as you suggested but about 18 minutes later boom:

[23:21:25] CoreStatus = 7B (123)
[23:21:25] Client-core communications error: ERROR 0x7b
[23:21:25] Deleting current work unit & continuing...

Ugg. Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise tough. I was likely to miss the final deadline on the 3050 anyway and it downloaded a 2653 to munch on. The PC is currently running at about 24 minutes per percent on the 2653.

I never did hear why the graphical client may be an advantage over the SMP service client?

Like Haggis said, the deadlines are longer, but the ppd are lower. If you have the SMP client running 23 min/step it's a better idea to run SMP.

adampk17 wrote:

Dang, I stopped and restarted the the client as you suggested but about 18 minutes later boom:

[23:21:25] CoreStatus = 7B (123)
[23:21:25] Client-core communications error: ERROR 0x7b
[23:21:25] Deleting current work unit & continuing...

Ugg. Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise tough. I was likely to miss the final deadline on the 3050 anyway and it downloaded a 2653 to munch on. The PC is currently running at about 24 minutes per percent on the 2653.

I never did hear why the graphical client may be an advantage over the SMP service client?

Try upgrading to the new beta 5.92 SMP client, it may stabilize your system

also, have you checked with CPU-Z or something to make sure that you are actually running at the speed you are supposed to be?

Your BIOS settings may have got set back to default somehow

david00214 wrote:

adampk17 wrote:

I never did hear why the graphical client may be an advantage over the SMP service client?

Like Haggis said, the deadlines are longer, but the ppd are lower. If you have the SMP client running 23 min/step it's a better idea to run SMP.

If the SMP client is giving you trouble, the standard (non-SMP) service client is preferable to the graphical client. You can run 2 copies to take advantage of both cores.

You might be able to improve things a bit by running the Linux SMP client under VMware, but it'll use a bit more system resources due to the extra overhead from VMware.

Hah, JBI is red!

41.60l23 wrote:

Hah, JBI is red!

Where have you been?

I suppose you missed the debut of my TR blog too?

No, I read it. I guess I haven't been paying much attention lately. Congrats on it, though!

ChrisDTC wrote:

Try upgrading to the new beta 5.92 SMP client, it may stabilize your system

also, have you checked with CPU-Z or something to make sure that you are actually running at the speed you are supposed to be?

Your BIOS settings may have got set back to default somehow

I'll try the 5.92 SMP client I guess if you think that really has a decent chance of helping. Any one else have an opinion on this? The CPU is running at its default clock of 1.86 GHz like it should be.

I didn't know anyone had continued to reply to my thread. Some how the email notices stopped.