How much RAM needed for VM - SMP crunching in Ubuntu?

Noto · 1 Apr 2009 at 20:24

Hi there,

I have just got into folding, and installed VMware Server 2.0

I am creating a VM how much ram should i allocate? I THINK i read somewhere that 1gb of ram is needed to be the most efficient when folding large proteins.

verbal · 1 Apr 2009 at 21:38

I give my VMs 512mb each but that's all used for folding as the OS I'm using doesn't use any (practically)

Maybe try 640mb if you have it to spare?

ChrissyT88 · 1 Apr 2009 at 21:58

I was told today in fact (weird?) by toTow (moderator on the official folding forums) that, if possible, 1gb of RAM is better for a VM running the SMP client. Some WUs can use up to 800mb of RAM (my current units are sitting at 580mb RAM usage with the desktop environment enabled), and having more RAM available obviously limits the use of the (slower) swap file. Apparently, this also reduces the risk of the client shutting down incorrectly/file corruption due to slow read/writes to the swap file. Mine have been running fine on 512 until now, but i will change them over as they finnish units. I think the higher, the better!

verbal · 1 Apr 2009 at 22:09

My clients don't have any swap space they can use. Perhaps that's why I had one unit fail with a memory error. However I have had units completing without problems using only 512mb of RAM for almost 3 weeks now with only that one failure.

My system has 2 VMs and 2 GPUs all folding 24/7 using 2Gb of RAM (XP64)

Mattus · 1 Apr 2009 at 22:45

I generally set each VM to 320MB. This works fine 99% of the time - however, I did get the occasional WU which would cause out-of-memory errors. If you want trouble-free running it's probably better to go for at least 512.

Noto · 1 Apr 2009 at 23:22

solved