Folding Forum

i was asked the question below by someone who wants to join , can you help

But so if I run it for say 5 hours while I was gone, how much bandwidth do you think it would it use? 200KB?, 800KB?, 1MB?, 3MB?

However I have just one question: Will using Folding @ Home take any internet bandwidth at all? I'm limited to only 5 GB per month.

FAH clients only uses bandwidth when downloading a new work unit, and afterwards to upload the results. No bandwidth usage in between, so the client may not use any bandwidth during a 5 hour span.

Rough estimates, you can do the math.

CPU client: 1-2 MB downloads 2-5 MB uploads, once every 2-5 days. [Assuming 24x7 folding, so at 5hr per day, that's about once every 10 - 25 days]
SMP is double CPU in bandwidth.
GPU 4x CPU in frequency.

There is a -bigadv option for SMP that blows these numbers out of the water, and I recommend avoiding that option on a capped connection.

We need to know what kind of hardware will be folding. A major factor in bandwidth usage is the speed of the processors. Fast processors finish units quickly and therefore download/upload more often.

As for client type, SMP2 is a huge bandwidth user on fast systems, I've noticed. It blows bigadv out of the water with its frequency of work unit churn. Some more recent A3's are smaller to upload, but the originals are 20 MB apiece, every 5-7 hours on fast quads. A high-end 980x or 2P system could hit the 5 GB monthly cap alone (running 24/7 on p6012-6015).

GPU units are tiny. Less than 200k for download + upload, and the frequency of uploads (once an hour?) doesn't make up for how small they are.

With just 5 hours of uptime in a sitting, though, I guess the uniprocessor client would be safer. I just don't have as much experience to estimate what a certain class of CPUs would consume in bandwidth there.

Wrish wrote:GPU units are tiny. Less than 200k for download + upload, and the frequency of uploads (once an hour?) doesn't make up for how small they are.

This is true for the CPU2 Client. However, the GPU3 BETA Client as approximately 3 MB - 5 MB upload + download. As the Client is still in BETA Stage, we can't reach a conclusive answer.