What does the "shutdown" command do, exactly?

[RBob]

Windows 10 Pro, client 7.6.21

Every evening after the backup finishes, I run a little program to issue a "PAUSE" followed by a "SHUTDOWN" to the client, which will be followed eventually by Windows' own shutdown.

Is the SHUTDOWN to the client worth issuing, or is the PAUSE before shutting down the computer good enough in all cases? For that matter, is a delay between PAUSE and SHUTOWN, or between PAUSE and letting Windows shutdown a good idea? How long?

[I've been doing the PAUSE/SHUTDOWN sequence for some time without any apparent problems; I'm just wondering if what I'm doing is either unnecessary or asking for trouble.]

[PaulTV]

When you pause, you basically tell the cores (who do the actual folding) to stop - which is nice of you to do. The shutdown command should stop the client (on Linux it doesn't, apparently), but there's no point to do so in this case. Neither should really be necessary though - the client and cores are designed to deal with shutdowns / reboots without user interaction.

[Joe_H]

My only addition would be that on Windows the shutting down by the OS often does not properly signal the client and wait long enough for the client to shutdown the folding cores. So pausing first before shutting down Windows is a good practice. I would give the client about a minute or so before doing the Windows shutdown.

[Neil-B]

... and some of us are really paranoid and both pause the slot and then after a minute shut the client down and then after another minute do whatever re reboot etc. ... Really shouldn't be necessary in an ideal world and is probably way over the top even in the real world but I haven't had any issues with damaged wus/client so just like I have a lucky t0shirt I wear for certain occasions I use the paranoid routine whether it actually makes any difference or not !!

[PaulTV]

Ah yes... updates is a different matter than regular shutdowns. Before updating Windows, at least pause folding. Before updating video drivers, it may even be better to have the WU finish first.

There is one thing that may be important after booting (as opposed to before shutting/rebooting)... if the fahclient starts before there's network connection, your GPU may be disabled (you'll see a message in the log about beta flags). That's because the file gpus.txt could not be updated. I let the login screen alone for a minute or so after booting before logging in to prevent this issue.

[RBob]

Looks like I can just leave things as is, even if there's a bit of overkill in the process.

[I added the "shutdown" call even though I wasn't sure what it did, but it sounded like something I wanted. When it didn't blow up, I just left it in.]

[Joe_H]

As far as I know keeping the shutdown there won't hurt anything. It may be a command left over from an earlier version of the client that doesn't do much now or depends on the OS and other environment settings.