Folding Flounders Phoning Home

By Paul Munn | February 1, 2008

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