macOS only processing if use "while I'm working"

[pidloop]

Hello!

Normally I process "Only while idle" and that used to work fine over night but I noticed I had not been processing any WU for over a month. So I changed to "While I am working" and it started up immediately and processed two WU fine yesterday afternoon. I set it back to "While idle", left it over night and again nothing ran. I guess I can run all the time but sometimes the fan noise gets to be a bit much. Anyway, pointers to getting "while idle" working again would be appreciated.

While I'm asking, I'd like to know exactly how FAH defines "idle" on macOS. Perhaps that would help me troubleshoot. I assume it just uses keyboard or mouse activity but if it uses CPU activity that could explain it because I am running other background tasks 24/7.

Thanks

macOS 10.15.6, 2017 iMac quad i7 27", FAH 7.6.13.

[Joe_H]

I am not sure of which macOS provided idle indicator the the client is checking, just that after a period of about 5 minutes of no user input the system would be detected as "on idle". At least that is how it worked for me in the past the few times I test the "On Idle" setting. I just leave the client running all of the time normally, so rarely have tested this setting.

It is possible Apple has changed how the checked status indicator works in newer versions of the OS, the newest version I am running is High Sierra. I will sed a question to the person who assists with the port to OS X/macOS, he might have further information on this.

Alternatives to using the built in On Idle setting would be manually pausing and unpausing or using scripts to do the same. The FAHClient process does accept commands from user written apps over the local network connection on IP 127.0.0.1 over port 36330.

[pidloop]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your help. Yes, I suspect macOS "idle" is now different in Catalina. I wish Apple would stop changing things.

But I successfully connected to FAHClient and issued a pause command. Works perfectly. This will be fine for me now.

Thanks again.

[calxalot]

viewtopic.php?f=96&t=26509&p=266660&hilit=Idle#p266660

[bruce]

(I'm not a Mac guy, so I didn't know the fact following the link the previous post.) Nevertheless, that's an unfortunate way of doing things.

In Windows, the power-saving setting of turning off the monitor is not directly related to the idle state. I can set my monitor to never be turned off but the idle state still happens. If a screensaver is actually used, the monitor needs to be powered on so it can be seen. How is that handled in MacOS?

Since FAH does not support GPU folding in MacOS, it's not a critical question. For my GPU to continue FOLDING when MY mouse/keyboard are inactive for N seconds, my GPU cannot be in power-saving mode.

[calxalot]

I don’t know the details or reasoning behind the Windows changes. You would have to ask Joseph directly.

I can confirm there is no problem with GPU folding under windows while the screen is blanked. So the GPU is not powered down when the video signal is cut.

Apple tightened security and made it impossible to get the user idle time in a process that is not directly under the current user console login context. As I recall, getting the idle time was not an efficient call, so I was not unhappy to see it go.

[bruce]

Is it reasonable to presume that MacOS does support some kind of a screensaver which comes on when the mouse/keyboard are idle but the screen is not blanked. (Maybe not, considering modern monitors don't suffer from screen-burnin!) My point if the supported software can do it, FAH should be able to do the same thing.

[calxalot]

Yes, there could be idle folding while screen saver is active. It would, however, add some undesirable complexity. There would need to be a launch agent that catches screensaver notifications and either directly connects to the client and claims to be the FAH screensaver, or it would simply relay the notifications as global notifications that the client would catch.

If macos ever gets a GPU core, it would seem counterproductive to fold while any complex screensaver is running.