Threads and Balancing tasks

[TheDevil]

The problem I am having, is Windows seems to ONLY put tasks to Group 0 (Node 0) and will never assign to Group 1 (Node 1) even when a task is running at 100 use for that group and it will continue to only run new tasks in that group forcing me manually move something like folding at home to the other node.

Is this a FAH issue? could there a hardware issue? or is there something in bios that could be creating this behavior?

Windows 10 PRO Ver is 21h2 build 19004.1889.
FAH 7.6.21
Device is a ProLiant DL360 Gen9 -
System ROM P89 v2.80 (10/16/2020) .
CPU x2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v4 @ 1.70GHz.
RDIMM is 64GB on 4x16gb sticks in sockets 12 and 9 for each processor.

[Joe_H]

Welcome to the folding support forum.

What you are running into is a Windows problem from what I understand. It may also depend on which Windows license you are running and BIOS settings. Windows assigns tasks to a processor group, and may not assign a process or its threads to another depending on a number of factors. In your case one CPU with 14 cores/28 threads is considered a processor group, the other CPU will be the second.

I don't understand all of the details involved, but this has been an issue with running F@h on Windows systems with multiple CPUs or high core counts. The high core/thread count shows up on single processor systems at 32 threads, F@h will use at most 32 threads as that appears to be the maximum considered to be a processor group under many of the Windows licenses.

[TheDevil]

Welcome to the folding support forum.

What you are running into is a Windows problem from what I understand. It may also depend on which Windows license you are running and BIOS settings. Windows assigns tasks to a processor group, and may not assign a process or its threads to another depending on a number of factors. In your case one CPU with 14 cores/28 threads is considered a processor group, the other CPU will be the second.

I don't understand all of the details involved, but this has been an issue with running F@h on Windows systems with multiple CPUs or high core counts. The high core/thread count shows up on single processor systems at 32 threads, F@h will use at most 32 threads as that appears to be the maximum considered to be a processor group under many of the Windows licenses.

Okay so If a split my CPUs to 16 and 16 or 14 14 should it work correctly?

[Joe_H]

It should, Windows 10 is supposed to be able to use dual processors and many threads over all licenses but Home. There may be an issue with the exact parameters set when the client was compiled, but that has not been tracked down. The scheduler in Windows 10 Enterprise is even more thread aware, but I haven't seen a good comparison of how it works vs. the one in Pro.

With projects using the A8 CPU folding core, depending on the size of the project in atoms you may see a "knee" at around 16 threads anyways. Projects with large atom counts may efficiently use more threads, smaller atom count projects may not run faster on more threads.

[TheDevil]

I tried this - no change -



Is there any setting I can do to force the FAH processes to bind to a specific group?

[toTOW]

Did you try changing affinities manually with Task Manager ?

I used the client on dual CPU systems before, and it never had troubles using all of them (with the limit of 32 threads per folding slot on Windows) ...

[TheDevil]

Yes, this seems to work some times, but once that work unit is complete (usualy 4-8 hours) the new task that is started just goes right back to the same behavior.

[toTOW]

You can use 3rd party tools like Process Lasso to automate the process : https://bitsum.com/

[XanderF]

Also worth pointing out - if eligible to upgrade to Windows 11 for free - that's very much worth doing.

The task scheduler for Windows 11 is INCREDIBLY better for Folding than any version of Windows 10 I've run.