Folding Flounders Phoning Home
If you’ve been running Folding@Home lately, or even not-so-lately on your PS3 you might have noticed the client software have to try multiple times to send back its work unit when it was done before being successful. I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times and it typically makes me question whether my broadband internet connection is on the fritz or not. We’re talking about sending back a chunk of data to a service that can’t possibly be that busy, right?
Well it is busy, and it turns out that some aggressive code in the 1.2 version of the client combined with messages the server side gives back are causing a high connectivity failure rate on the PS3 client. The folks at Stanford have updated the server code and are writing fixes into the upcoming 1.3 client, but the server fixes alone have gotten the connectivity failures down to a manageable level.
Ever since I realized how expensive running Folding was for me here in the northeastern US power market, I’ve only rarely run Folding. Nowadays I will run it while my PS3 downloads from the Store or charges the controller, but I still feel like I should run it more often.
See also:
Profiles in Power: The PS3, 360, and Wii
Source: The Folding@Home Blog
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What you’re not running it 24/7? Think of all the people that just died because we didn’t get the scientific information you would have processed? MILLIONS ARE DEAD AT YOUR HANDS! You just caught your life expectancy by 2 years!
[/end funny]
Yeah, when it originally came out, one of my friends ran his the first night over night. The next morning the console was uncomfortably warm so he decided that he wasn’t about to melt down $500 worth of gaming hardware.