I've been experiencing problems with fold-it running slowly, especially with the larger proteins. I have heard others complain about this as well. When pulling or banding, for example, there is a noticeable lag that sometimes results in pulling the wrong thing or failing to place a band properly. Wiggling can be agonizingly slow.
It would be nice if there was a way to turn off certain graphical options before starting Foldit. I know you can turn off some things like voids and sidechains and the like (this helps, but usually not enough) but is there a way to default to a lower graphics quality somehow when starting up? Could there be a special setting in the options file where you could optimize foldit for slower computers – make it less pretty but faster or turn on sidechains in wireframe view?
** side note: until recently, foldit was running okay for me. Two days ago, I upgraded Ubuntu (to 8.04 from … don't remember, some really old version). Intriguingly, when I started it up, two things were different: a) the sidechains looked better and b) it was horrifically slow. Turns out my graphics had not been displaying properly and I had been seeing wireframe sidechains before. They were ugly, but they probably sped things up w/ my system. Now that things are displaying properly, I'm experiencing problems. Which makes me wonder … wouldn't it be cool if folks could opt to turn on wireframe sidechains?
until the first monstrously big decoy puzzle I had absolutely no problems running foldit
(despite a slow computer apparently, lol, thanks for informing me Pletscheroo and Jude :P )
Anyway, at first I thought it was the size of the puzzles making things run slow, but now that the puzzles I'm working on are as small as before, foldit is STILL as slow as an old lady….
(no offense to any old ladies out there)
It's not just foldit, ever since things started to slow down, I can hardly surf the web when foldit is running (which is funny, because it ain't running that fast, so the proper way to say this is that I can hardly surf the web when foldit is walking, lol)
my question:
who pushed the red button, and can it be undone?
I also find Foldit very slow, expecially when big proteins are loaded. I noticed that CPU usage of Foldit is constantly at 100%, even if you don't wiggle/pull/do anything, and I know games which show much better graphics and don't use that much CPU at all. ;) I'm sure there's still much room for improvement. Instead of simplifying the graphics, please look at your code and see if there's anything that can be optimized (in case you don't do that anyway). :) (I don't like the current voids, they are hexagons and the previous ones looked much better imho, more like balls. Were they changed because of performance reasons?)
Thats right. It's not 100% for me, but I have 2 cores. But "one" is at 100% for foldit every time, meaning foldit takes 50%. That is new.
I've only seen this behavior in old games that used to take 100% on single cores.
I think the programmers have messed up some code in the last update.
from a little asking in the chat and guessing from the posts above, it seems that all 32bit-systems are effected, with the amount of one core 100%.
Only one I found that was not was an intel q6600 on Vista 64, that was down to ~10% of one core.
LennStar, I'm on a dual core, 64 bit system. But one of my cores is generally 100 percent or maybe 80-90 percent when playing fold-it. The other one is usually 60 percent or so. That seems really high to me, and nicky is right that it ends up slowing down everything substantially if you do dare to try to surf the web or something while playing.
This just doesn't really seem optimal … or necessary. Especially for folks with slower computers, but maybe for everyone else as well if foldit is hogging up all the system resources it can.
all the people that answered (4 ^^)used some win system.
What uses the 60%? O.o
Either way, I have no big problems on my dual core with surfing etc.
As I write, it wiggles ;)
Only to be sure: No one of you uses BOINC and has just upgraded to the latest version? That one makes more use of CUDA, and that can significantly slow down any 2D-grafics.
If you do, stop it for a test.
Well, I said in my post that I use Ubuntu, so I don't think your answer really makes sense.
Does turning off the viewing of sidechains help with the speed?
We had started a feature where segments near the mouse would show up as they do now, and ones further away would be lines (not exactly wireframe). Would that be useful? We can try to finish that up and release it.
Thanks for looking into this, seth.
Turning off sidechains definitely helps a bit, though with the larger proteins especially, my computer is still really struggling.
I think what you've described with the farther-away segments appearing as lines would be great and probably speed things up for a lot of folks! From what I've heard other people saying about foldit running so slow, I think a lot of people would use that feature.
