Folding Forum

Endgame124 wrote:

Joe_H wrote:

foldy wrote:I guess startup peak RAM usage is not so important as it can be swapped temporarily.

As long as you have enough swap space available. There have been reports of some of the larger WUs exceeding 5 GB of VM during startup, and not working because too little swap was available.

I just caught one WU a few days ago that went up to 4.8GB which put me pretty far into swap before dropping down to 2.2GB. I setup a 8GB zram swap partition to give me some extra space and so I wouldn’t put wear on my SSD for most swapping that occurs. So far, so good.

Hey, I know you've already set this up, but zswap is a lot smarter than zram! https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Zswap

My 6 GPU rig is on Ubuntu 18.04.4. It was not happy with 8GB RAM and would occasionally fail a WU with a no memory error. I'm at 16GB RAM on the system now and running 9/16 threads of F@H or Rosetta in addition to GPU folding I have not seen any more WU failures but do see some Swap usage now and again.

Current utilization shows 1.384GB per Slot but the Swap is at 4GB and has slowly climbed over the 4 days since it's last restart,

I'll likely upgrade it to 24GB to get some breathing room.

My suggestion would be to just run with 32GB for a 8-GPU system from the start.

Windows 10:
I watched x22 p14251 (1018,2,11) from download through the first 2 percent. It ramped up gradually from zero RAM to 1,477 MB. I didn't see any big RAM spikes at any point for this project.

@gordonbb: At 8GB RAM did you try to set a large swap file e.g. 16Gb and did it slow down anything? I'm not sure if a work unit really needs all the RAM allocated or if swapping 50% is good enough.

foldy wrote:14201 FahCore_22 Windows 1700 MB

14251 FahCore_22 v0.0.5 Windows 1350 MB. After pause and resume it has 1100 MB. After next checkpoint it is at 1350 MB again.

14253 FahCore_22 Windows 1700 MB.

16441 FahCore_22 v0.0.5 Windows 970 MB

16442 FahCore_22 v0.0.5 Windows 900 MB

For me, 14201 has become really common, and it's a hungry hungry hippo:

14201 FahCore_22 v0.0.5 Windows 2700 MB

When writing checkpoints, it climbs to 3400 MB, but drops again after.

FAH checks RAM when it makes an assignment, but it makes it's decision based on a system that's not running multiple GPUs. I have not found a good way to deal with that level of virtual memory usage. Ever with the paging file on SSD thrashing can become a problem.

Personally I would install enough RAM (8GB should be enough) and set swap and hybernation file to zero (or off).
I've never ran into a situation where I ran over 7,5GB of RAM, and that was with FAH running and a browser open with a good 20 to 40 tabs.