Paratima
05-13-2004, 07:05 PM
WINDOWS ONLY
Don't run EON with another DC client and expect both clients to produce, at least under Windows. I tested with Win2K on an AMD xp3000+ with 512MB RAM. All clients were run at equal, default (Low) priority.
EON and Find-A-Drug: Looks OK, EON loses.
EON and Climate Prediction: Looks OK, EON loses.
EON and Distributed Folding: EON gets all the CPU, DF loses.
I tried it with the clients shown. You can (and should) try it with your own favorite. With FAD and CP, it *looks* as if they are getting equal shares of the CPU. However, EON is struggling. With those two, EON MAY crank out a WU in the allotted time, but I don't think it'll happen very often. I suspect it has to do with context switching:
Program A is running. It loads up the CPU's cache of RAM and goes to town. The Level-1 and Level-2 caches are furiously churning along, keeping the CPU fed and happy with lots of instructions and data to crunch. *BOOM*! Program B gets its time-slice. Save the CPU state for later and reload all the cache with Prog-B's instructions and data. Happily crunching when all of a sudden *BOOM*! You get the idea. That's context switching in a nutshell.
As good as modern CPU's are, and that's pretty good, two highly processor-intensive programs are never going to run together at CPU/2. There will always be some loss to context switching. It looks to be pretty bad with the EON client. Who knows why? Just the way it processes and is laid out in memory, is my guess, and a guess is all I have atm. Plus the fact that EON is running under a severe time constraint. It must get every WU processed and sent back quickly.
What you CAN do quite successfully is run your 2nd client at a lower priority, as mentioned by several of our Free-DC crunchers. All the clients start out Low by default, so just crank EON up to BelowNormal using Task Manager. EON will crunch like crazy, your backup client will be there to take up the slack if EON runs out of work, and you can still surf the web. Note however, that your secondary client won't run until/unless EON takes a break for whatever reason.
Don't run EON with another DC client and expect both clients to produce, at least under Windows. I tested with Win2K on an AMD xp3000+ with 512MB RAM. All clients were run at equal, default (Low) priority.
EON and Find-A-Drug: Looks OK, EON loses.
EON and Climate Prediction: Looks OK, EON loses.
EON and Distributed Folding: EON gets all the CPU, DF loses.
I tried it with the clients shown. You can (and should) try it with your own favorite. With FAD and CP, it *looks* as if they are getting equal shares of the CPU. However, EON is struggling. With those two, EON MAY crank out a WU in the allotted time, but I don't think it'll happen very often. I suspect it has to do with context switching:
Program A is running. It loads up the CPU's cache of RAM and goes to town. The Level-1 and Level-2 caches are furiously churning along, keeping the CPU fed and happy with lots of instructions and data to crunch. *BOOM*! Program B gets its time-slice. Save the CPU state for later and reload all the cache with Prog-B's instructions and data. Happily crunching when all of a sudden *BOOM*! You get the idea. That's context switching in a nutshell.
As good as modern CPU's are, and that's pretty good, two highly processor-intensive programs are never going to run together at CPU/2. There will always be some loss to context switching. It looks to be pretty bad with the EON client. Who knows why? Just the way it processes and is laid out in memory, is my guess, and a guess is all I have atm. Plus the fact that EON is running under a severe time constraint. It must get every WU processed and sent back quickly.
What you CAN do quite successfully is run your 2nd client at a lower priority, as mentioned by several of our Free-DC crunchers. All the clients start out Low by default, so just crank EON up to BelowNormal using Task Manager. EON will crunch like crazy, your backup client will be there to take up the slack if EON runs out of work, and you can still surf the web. Note however, that your secondary client won't run until/unless EON takes a break for whatever reason.