lower priority

I know this might seem strange, but I am hoping for a future version which will allow setting the priority to a level lower than 4 (Windows notation). I am running FoldIt on my laptop, and even at this priority, my 1.8 GHz Celeron never slows below 1.18 GHz, the fan is always on, and the air that exits from the fan is pretty hot :scared:

Sorry to break the news, but ANY DC project will do that on a laptop! :eek:

The DF client already runs at the lowest possible priority, but your CPU usage will always be high because the client uses ALL the horsepower that you have that isn't in use by any other process.

You might want to experiment with auto or semi-automatic ways to run the project for a while (to be determined by you), then shut it down for a cooling-off period, then restart, etc. "Cycling" as it were. I haven't heard of anyone currently doing this.

If you work out something that does it for you, post it here for other folks! ;)

You might want to try out http://t2.technion.ac.il/~sm0ti/dfDetect.zip

I haven't made any changes to it in a long time, but you can set it up to run folding for a while, take a break from folding for however long you want, and then start folding again. It can also shutdown DF when certain programs are running (can't remember if this work on Win9x or not).

Don't know if any of this helps.

Good luck!

Did a search for ya; take a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...policy_str.asp

I don't have the time right now (and no way to test this either!), but it shouldn't be too hard to make a little program you can run which will throttle the CPU speed down for ya using ForcedThrottleDc/Ac.

Anyone else with the skills and time wanna take a stab at it?


Guess you also try http://www.waste.org/~winkles/throttle/ I have no idea if/how-well it works.

Thanks for all your replies. I will try dfDetect and Throttle and I will look into the MSDN info.

I had Folding@Home and it allowed me to lower CPU usage to around 30%, and I am sure I could have lowered it again if I had wanted to.

I will post my findings.

Thanks again

Just curious if someone could explain, in techie layman's terms how a program limits the CPU usage?

As for the laptop you might consider raising the back end up higher using a book to help ventilate it better. If you have a small fan, you can use it to blow air onto and around the laptop to help cool it down, especially underneath.

~RS

The use of liquid nitrogen, an extremeluy effective coolant, is often overlooked as well :crazy:

Great idea, Howard. Maybe you could send a small packet of liquid nitrogen at each client update, just to keep the crunchers running at max! :jester:

Quote:

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Originally posted by Paratima
Great idea, Howard. Maybe you could send a small packet of liquid nitrogen at each client update, just to keep the crunchers running at max! :jester:

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There's no more :rofl: I think. :mad:

Anyways, :) :cool: :jester:

At least I can explain how Throttle works :

Quote:

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Throttle uses your system hardware to modify the clock speed going to your CPU.

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I am testing Throttle currently, and it seems to do something. The problem is the CPU usage reported by WinXP's task manager is still the same (which actually is understandable if the CPU usage is measured in time units rather that CPU cycles), but FoldIt visibly runs slower.

To improve the tests, I guess I will need to check the time until the fan starts in both cases. This is going to be difficult since environment here is quite noisy. I will try to find a mainboard temperature monitoring utility that will work on my laptop.

Quote:

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Originally posted by m0ti
There's no more :rofl: I think. :mad:

Anyways, :) :cool: :jester:

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:rotfl: rotfl

Quote:

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Originally posted by IronBits
:rotfl: rotfl

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:rotfl:

Egad! :eek: It works!

I promised to post the results of mytests, here they come:

I had a little difficulty finding a temperature monitor for my Dell laptop, but I finally did find one on the Dell forums.

I used Throttle at different levels
st = Start Time
et = End Time
ct = CPU Temperature
gt= GPU Temperature
ht = HD Temperature

..............st....et....ct.gt.ht
no Throttle . 13:15 14:00 62 53 66
Throttle 7 .. 14:02 14:43 44 43 55
Throttle 6 .. 14:44 16:28 46 44 56
Throttle 5 .. 16:35 18:21 49 46 61

Here, Foldtraj found there was a new version. So I did a new test without Throttle and I got:

..............st....et....ct.gt.ht
no Throttle . 11:03 12:01 53 48 63


The temperature seems now acceptably low without doing anything, so I will stop my tests. But I have learned something.

By the way, the new version seems much less demanding on system resources. Before task switching was pretty slow, but now it is almost normal.

Thanks again for all your suggestions