F@H half speed on Vista??

[Bozo]

I have two computers running F@H smp.
#1 = C2D 6550, 3.2GHz, 4GB ram, Gigabyte P35 motherboard. This is running XP 64 bit.
#2 = C2D 6420, 3.6GHz, 4GB ram, Gigabyte P35 motherboard. This is running Vista 64 bit.

#2 produces half the WUs as #1. I wouldn't believe the difference in CPUs would make that much difference. Is Vista really that slow running F@H?

Bozo :joker:

 

[Fushigi]

My Core2Quad running the SMP Folding client on Vista Home Basic runs roughly the same speed as my other C2Q running Kubuntu & the SMP client.

On my other C2Q system, it was having issues with the SMP client so it runs 4 of the regular console-mode clients (+ the GPU client). My new laptop didn't like the SMP client (mpiexec was consuming lots of CPU & no work was actually performed) so it's running a pair of console-mode clients instead.

 

[P5-133XL]

I don't believe that Vista is the problem. Vista does run slower, but not that much. You can compare the CPU's folding capabilities at fahinfo[url].

Given the same WU -- One thing that can make that much difference with some WU's and that is RAM BW, latency, and the chips cache speed and size. But, I don't know that there is that much difference between those two models. Also, on one machine, if there are any other processes that are taking up CPU cycles (since everything has a higher priority), it will fold much slower. During the folding configuration, there is an option that limits the CPU usage: If you tell it only to use 50% of the CPU then .... Also during configuration, you can tell the machine not to get Big WU's and they give a 100% bonus points.

Now you do have to compare apples to apples: There are wide differences between individual WU's. There are the WU's that give bonus points. There are older WU's that don't use all the features of modern CPU's specificly SSE and those WU's will run far slower. As far as the number of WU's done, that also varries from WU's designed to finish in 3-4 hours to WU's designed to finish in weeks or months depending on the CPU's capabilities: Of course, the WU's points are scaled too.

My point is that there are a lot of variables: Some controllable and some not. It just isn't that easy to attribute the slowdown to just Vista vs XP.

 

[Will Rickards]

I can't get reliable production out of the windows SMP client.
It requires intervention on an almost weekly basis.
File IO error on this work unit or hanging while not connecting to F@H.
So I'm pretty sure you can't even compare systems as the client itself is not stable.