Distributed Folding GUI v0.5 for Windows

[Digital Parasite]

I had a bit more time to work on another release so I am posting it tonight. I also tested dfGUI with the auto-update function now that a new protein is available. It works great in non-hidden mode, it will ask you to press 'Y' as usual then download the new client and start working. It also works fine in hidden mode if you have set the autoupdate.cfg file with a "1" in it. So basically auto-update works as expected if you are using dfGUI.

v0.5 (May 30, 2002)
- Added option to start dfGUI in the system tray so it will load "minimized" and not show up in the system tray
- Added OS/CPU info to benchmark section which gets pulled out of the Registry
- Added "Write Bench Info" button to output your current benchmark information to a file "benchmark.txt" to send/post for others. Special thanks to Dyyryath for helping me with this.
- Fixed several minor bugs

You can download it at the usual spot:
http://gilchrist.ca/jeff/dfGUI/

If you find any bugs, please let me know.

Jeff.

[Scott Jensen]

What does GUI stand for? I'm guessing it stands for Graphical User Interface. Close?

How much does running this cost my CPU? In other words, how much does it take away from the DF client?

Can the next version check the rankings, total units, and such? Both your individual stuff and your team's. This done after each time work units have been sent back to get one's current standing. And a nice +/- % of change in position since last posting would be nice. Hmmm. Even nicer would be knowing the three to five crunchers directly above and below you and their rank % increase/decrease in the ranking and their total work units since the last time the program checked yours. I really liked in FAH seeing who I was directly competing with. With my little 500MHz Dell computer, I never had a chance of making FAH's top ten group (nor do I have a chance here either), but did love knowing the racehorses I was passing or that were passing me. :) Oh, and when you do pass someone, it would be cool being told you did. Maybe the one you passed has their name in red ... hmmm ... and ones that pass you have their name in green. Then again, maybe only do these checks and such when the user clicks a button and the rank changes and % increase/decrease comparisons based on the last time you check this.

[Digital Parasite]

Scott : Yes, GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. About your other requests there is no way for my program to find out what people's stats rankings are, I can only get what the DF client gives me. The people who do their own stats web sites have to download the stats every hour/however often and parse through all the data and update their information which is quite time consuming. This would be a huge task to add to the dfGUI client. What we would need is for Howard to output your current ranking in the progress.txt file which maybe could be updated when you send in results.

As for how much resources dfGUI uses, it depends on what your refresh rate it set to. Normally it should take up almost nothing if you have it set to something like 10 or 30 seconds. If it updates every second it will use more resources but still not much. All it does is read your progress.txt file and do some quick benchmark calculations. Probably uses less resources than the DF client drawing the ASCII picture of the protein.

Jeff.

[1fast6]

Digital P... nice additions... you're as quick to respond as the project admins... many thanks for answering my requests... great proggie you got here...

in answer to the question of resource utilization... it stays under 0.10% cpu utilization at all times... and then only when reading data... most often it is completely idle... this is as reported by taskinfo2000 on win98...

[Burgergold]

Distributed Folding Windows dfGUI v0.5 Benchmark

Sample Size: -14940 structures over 1460 seconds.

Structures Per Second: -10.51
Structures Per Minute: -630.8
Structures Per Hour : -37849
Structures Per Day : -908386

OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 MHz: 945
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) Processor

euh?!? why am I "-" in my bench?

[1fast6]

!emit ni sdrawkcab gnillevart era uoY

:D

[Digital Parasite]

Burgergold: Check your "# of structures" setting on the bottom left of dfGUI to make sure it is correct. With the new protein, online clients do 3000 per update and offline clients do 5000. If you have the wrong number set it would mess up your calculations.

Hmm but it is odd that you have -14940 structures since that value should be read directly from your progress.txt file. If you are still getting those values could you make a copy of your progress.txt file and send it to me?

1fast6 : Thanks and you are welcome.

Jeff.

[MAD-ness]

Change your PC's time or something?

Odd timing issues would net you odd negative times in foldmonitor.

[Digital Parasite]

Yes, the timing method involves taking the current time and comparing it the start time of the client, start time of dfGUI and such so if you changed your system time it would give strange results.

But that still didn't explain why the # of structures complete was negative which turned out to be the key. The # of structures complete in the benchmark.txt is not read directly from the progress.txt it is a value taken when the dfGUI starts so it can time how fast the client is running. What happened was Burgergold probably left his dfGUI running and stopped the DF client so it uploaded its results then stared the client again so the # of structures complete now became 0 and the remaining became 3000 or 5000. The dfGUI is supposed to reset itself in this case but I guess it didn't reset that field properly so it thinks you have done say 4000 structures and when it compare it to the current 5 structures now you get a negative value.

Thanks Burgergold for finding this, I will go and fix it now.

Jeff.

[Digital Parasite]

I looked into the bug a bit more and it seems I did take that scenario into account but only if dfGUI detected the DF client had stopped so if your refresh rate was high and you were able to start and stop the client without dfGUI refreshing it would get confused.

I have now fixed the bug and it should reset itself in that situation in all cases. I hope to post a new version with that fix and also some better Win98 CPU speed detection code in the next day or so.

Jeff.

[Burgergold]

I haven't change the time

progress.txt
Building structure 4045
1955 until next upload


benchmark.txt

Distributed Folding Windows dfGUI v0.5 Benchmark

Sample Size: -11010 structures over 40219 seconds.

Structures Per Second: -0.27
Structures Per Minute: -16.4
Structures Per Hour : -986
Structures Per Day : -23659

OS : Microsoft Windows 2000 MHz: 945
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) Processor

[Digital Parasite]

Burgergold : Check out the latest version and tell me if you are still having problems:
http://bane.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=958

Jeff.