Folding Forum

I'm just reporting my impressions of FAH on Win10 vs. Win7. I'd be interested in responses from others with similar setups who either have or do not have the problems I'm reporting.

I used to run a 4-way CPU with two GPUs and there were enough resources to run a CPU:2 slot and easily meet deadlines. That's not working on WIn10.

Looking at Task Monitor,
FAHCore_21 gets about 30 % each instead 25%
FAHCore A4 was getting about 1-2% instead of 50%.
Various Windows services take up the rest of 100%.

Changing it from CPU:2 to CPU:1 didn't change anything.

A significant amount of processor time was going to
Service Host: Local Service (Network Restricted) (a group of 10 services)
I googled that and got a report that one of the services in that group was superfetch and they recommended disabling it. After doing so, that group uses much less processor time and FahCore_a4 has moved up the list significantly ... but now System is using about 20% of the CPU (not sure if that's related or not.)

I'm thinking it's time to find another copy of Win7 but I though I'd open it for discussion before wiping the disk.

(And don't recommend LInux ... I already use it on other machines.)

I do not ave any GPUs folding, so my results will vary form yours.
On Win 7 the Core gets about 97% of the CPU time.
On Win 10 the Core gets about 65% of the CPU time.

This may be a reporting artifact, perhaps Windows 10 more accurately reports OS overhead than Windows 7 did. But is does appear frustrating.

That's useful information and not inconsistent with my findings.

If it's a more accurate accounting for overhead, then the CPU should still earn the same PPD. Do you have an accurate comparison of a single set of hardware on WIn10 vs. Win7. My hunch is that they're quite different, but real data is better than hunches.

In Windows Taskmanager you should be able to activate kernel time display. So you see a red line which part of CPU is used for system.
There may also be some Windows background services which take some CPU time to do maintanance (like Superfetch).
But this should be temporal and end after some hours depending on disk speed (fast on SSD long time on HDD).
e.g. with nvidia GPU folding the CPU time used is shown as Kernel time (it is inside nvidia driver)

As Superfetch was running on your system I guess it has a HDD. The other service running on HDD disk is Index Service or Windows Search. Maybe disable this service will help too.

A second group of tasks is started periodically using Windows Task Scheduler. There you can see if a task is currently running and maybe disable it if not needed. e.g. telemetry tasks can take longer times on HDD and you don't need it. This is not specific to Windows 10 I also got my Windows 7 going down in performance because suddenly such tasks where running.

Do you by any chance use a virus protection program other than Defender, which comes stock with Windows 10? I don't fold in Windows but have a windows 10 virtual machine that runs on my Linux Host. When I converted my vm from Windows 7 to 10 I had huge performance issues that I finally tracked down to my Avast virus software which I'd used for years without problems in Windows XP and 7. The strange thing was that the excess CPU consumption didn't show up as Avast in task monitor but in some of the services, I don't recall exactly which. Uninstalling Avast totally fixed the problem. Windows 10 and Avast just didn't play well together. I also went into task monitor and disabled everything I wasn't sure I needed, which also helped some.
In my case folding in Linux with 3 GPUs and an 8 core CPU the relatively small additional amount of points I was getting from cpu folding compared with the GPUs just didn't justify the performance hit on my PC so I stopped doing it. Of course in my case I do a lot of heavy CPU usage other things.

Can you post a screenshot of task manager showing this ?

I don't think I ever see such things on my multiples Win 10 machines, so I'm inclined to think that something is wrong with your system ...

I agree with toTOW -- something must not be right with your system. Last week, I built a Win10 gaming PC for my daughter with a i7-6950X and a Titan X (Pascal) and ran FAH on it for a week for burn-in testing (overclocked to 4 GHz). Had 18 (out of 20) cores dedicated to CPU, and two cores to feed the GPU. Never had an issue with A4 or A7 cores keeping the CPU at 90%, and with GPU core21's the total CPU load was 97%. System services consumed very little of the CPU when running FAH.

SteveWillis wrote:Do you by any chance use a virus protection program other than Defender, which comes stock with Windows 10?

I think Steve may have figured it out -- or at least part of it.

I was running Search&Destroy. I gathered enough information to report a problem to them and have suspended it. Things are much better now, although there's still something that's gradually consuming more memory. Previously I had to rebood every couple of days. Now it looks like I can go maybe a week without rebooting. I did notice that Microsoft does recommend rebooting regularly to clean up memory. I never had to do that with Windows 7 (or with Linux).

Reboot is only a workaround for a process which has a memory leakage. Mabye you can check before and after a week which process memory usage increases significantly? Normally you need to reboot Windows 10 only if some updates require that.

My 64 bit two GPU shows, 8 gb ram

#1 12.8% Fah core_21.exe mem 380mb
#2 11.1% Fah core_21.exe mem 311mb
#3 75.1% Fah core_a4 (32 bit) mem 62 mb

#1&2 wild guess here are GPU's 1060 & 960
#3 CPU

Using Windows Defender! Any services, to disable or other tweaks, to boost #1&2?

Also I believe "O & O's shut up win 10" turns allot off, I believe including Telemetry, Free App. Also not sure how much it helped, settings > privacy > background apps. I turned most off, it's a long list of background apps.
________

My 64 bit Win7 reports:

Fah core_21 cpu 75 mem 79,000K

Fah core_21 cpu 03 mem 602,000K

That tool "O & O's shut up win 10" looks really good.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Good finding Ricorocks

Thanks Foldy, I should have posted the link