Folding Forum

Hi everyone,

I realise there's a shortage of work at the moment, but I have a weird, reasonably repeatable problem that I wanted to checkout....

• My computer is happily churning away through WU's
• It'll finish and (I presume) return the work it's just completed but then won't be able to download anymore work. Ok fine, there's nothing available.
• I'll come back to the computer some hours later, it's still not doing any work. I restart the software, just to make sure nothings crashed, and there's still no free WU's.
• I'll then restart the computer and somehow it will magically find some WU's.

I've done this 3 or 4 times recently and it's worked every time.

Am I hitting some sort of mandated pause for my client that is cleared after a restart?

Welcome to the F@H Forum olliecampbell,

A new WU is generated once the previous WU has successfully been received and verified by the Server. For example, you will only be assigned Project: 11777 (Run 0, Clone 5578, Gen 26) once Project: 11777 (Run 0, Clone 5578, Gen 25) was submitted. Thus, it involves a bit of luck right now. However, F@H Team's goal is to ensure that the supply meets the new (high) demand.

Do note that pause/unpause the Slot will reset the time retrial period so please do it if the timer reaches few hours to prevent adding unnecessary load to the over-loaded servers

Nothing that I know of that is cleared by a reboot that isn't cleared by restarting the software. Pausing and unpausing resets the only timer for getting new work I know of.

I started to think it was just coincidental but it's just happened again...

No WU's "No WUs available for this configuration". Pause and Start the Advanced Client, no change.
Restart the computer (because I had to for another reason) and everything starts churning once it's restarted 30 seconds later.

I wonder if there is some form of client throttling happening at the server end, from an auto-generated machine ID in the client software. Which a restart could re-generate.

I'm not sure, just hypothesising and I don't fancy installing Wireshark to find out

The machine ID is changed when you add/remove slots or when installing/uninstalling F@H Software. The only network related aspect is DNS which is used to connect to the AS... out of curiosity, are you getting the next WU in sequence? I do know in past that some donors due to the time they returned a WU, and they got a new one, they would next one in sequence. You can look at the previous log files to find out the PRCG.

I can vouch for this behaviour.

I have two machines with Windows 10 and a 1070 slot (no cpu slot)
I have a Linux machine with two 1070s
I have a Linux machine with a 1070 and a TitanX

One might get a new unit immediately following a completion while another is being told there's no units for that configuration. Now I realise there's a little luck here in that one might just happen to catch a unit but they are all basically the same configuration. GPU only and either a GP104 or a GM200. Why one would get a unit and another be told there's no work remains a mystery I am trying to solve.

But rebooting resets the timer counts. So a machine that has had no work for a couple of hours then gets told to wait longer and longer between tries, until these waits can be in multiple hours. Rebooting resets that so that the first try is immediate, the second try is in seconds, the third within minutes. So rebooting allows a rapid number of tries to be made in a shorter time and this may result in picking up a unit.

pause slot - wait for config to reset (watch log maybe 30s) then restart folding on slot also resets timer to immediate try iirc.

Neil-B wrote:pause slot - wait for config to reset (watch log maybe 30s) then restart folding on slot also resets timer to immediate try iirc.

OK I'll give that a go. I haven't been pausing for 30 seconds.

One benefit of this is it allows you to reset one slot whilst the other is still working - If there is something "magic" about rebooting (which is obviously a matter for debate) you won't get that but you will get a full retry timer reset (your tries counter will still be getting bigger though).