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F@H Bandwidth/Data Usage

Discussion in 'bit-tech Folding Team' started by Unicorn, 21 Oct 2016.

  1. Unicorn

    Unicorn Uniform November India

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    At the moment I'm running a few of my machines on a very remote site off a 4G modem router, which has a 25GB per month SIM in it. For the past couple of months, it's run out of data which has caused annoying downtimes and forced me to make visits to the site which are becoming costly! In trying to get to the bottom of this, I have discovered that one of my rigs with 2x GTX 970s in it is reporting that F@H has transferred 9GB of data in the last 30 days.

    Now, if two cards in one machine are using 9GB then it's fair to assume that the other two single card machines are using a similar amount, so there's an estimated 18GB of data that F@H is using per month on 4x cards... And if you take into account all the other things like Windows updates, Teamviewer sessions, Dropbox syncs and so on, it's not hard to see why they're burning through 25GB per month. At one point I added 10GB to the account on a Friday and came back on Monday morning to find that it was only a few hundred megabytes off running out again...

    So, why is the client using so much data all of a sudden? Because this never happened before, it's only started in the past couple of months. Can you suggest any way to prevent this?

    [edit]

    Here's the data usage for the dual card machine over 30 days as reported by Windows 10. Also calling into question what's going on with the 4.36GB that Firefox is using in a 30 day period on a headless machine which is dedicated to folding and doesn't even have a keyboard, mouse or monitor attached to it 99% of the time, and the 3+GB that CAM (which is an NZXT app for controlling fan speeds through a Grid+ fan controller) is transferring.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: 21 Oct 2016
  2. DocJonz

    DocJonz Another CPC refugee .....

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    In Win10, you can tell it which apps you want to allow to run in the background - I suggest you try switching some of these apps to Off and see if that reduces things.
     
  3. Unicorn

    Unicorn Uniform November India

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    I have since turned everything that I can off in an attempt to stem the flow of data. I haven't checked on it recently because I've been so busy, but the last time I was there I actually set up a redundant connection to another 25GB SIM so they will use one and then switch over to the other if and when the data on the primary connection runs out. It's a complete PITA, I want to put an ADSL connection into this location soon, but there are problems with the line to the building so it will need a lot of work before that can happen.
     
  4. theshadow2001

    theshadow2001 [DELETE] means [DELETE]

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    Throw a firewall on and lock the machine down so only the connections to the folding servers are allowed.
     
  5. Unicorn

    Unicorn Uniform November India

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    That's a good idea, but if you look at the image that I posted you can see the client is actually using the largest percentage of the data. My question was why is F@H using so much data in 30 days when work units are only a few megabytes in size. What's the biggest work unit, approximately 20MB? Is it conceivable that the clients could use 9GB of data in a 30 day period (currently 11.5GB for that machine, I just checked) just from downloading and uploading work?
     
  6. theshadow2001

    theshadow2001 [DELETE] means [DELETE]

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    Sorry I'm on hillbilly grade mobile data, so the picture never downloaded. There's still a good chunk of data wasted on useless stuff so no harm to put the firewall in. The firefox usage is unusual if you aren't actually using the machine. Check the history to make sure no one else was I suppose.

    As for the folding, well I don't know anything about that, but can't you estimate the approximate data through put given a worst case work unit size and your points for the machine. There's 450 20MB work units in 9GB of data, if we assume the amount of data coming down is the same going up then that would be 225 work units. Does that sound like a reasonable number or does it sound like a lot?
     
  7. Unicorn

    Unicorn Uniform November India

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    For the record, I sort of solved this and it turns out that each GM204 (maxwell) GPU slot that I am running (which in the case of my farm is either GTX 970 or 980 cards) needs approximately 5GB of bandwidth per month to operate at full folding capacity. Multiply that by the number of cards in the farm and add another 5GB for headroom as well as windows and application updates, and my farm is now consuming on average 70GB of data per month. I still haven't come up with a better way of achieving this than swapping between SIMs every time the data on one runs out, but it's an ever evolving setup and I hope to come up with a more permanent and hands-off solution soon.
     

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