Production ?

shadowscotland

shadowscotland

shadowscotland

Soldato
Joined
31 May 2006
Posts
7,564
Location
West London
Having ram issues here at the farm.

To those that don't know the Farm is in an architects office and the CAD (computer aided Design) package we use is very ram hungry, mix that with outlook2003 and xp pro and many of the users here are complaining (what this Fahcore thing using up all my resources, my mchine is really slow today, why is it taking so long blar, blar, blar) To be honest AutoCad2007 alone is using 200-500mb of ram and we only have 500mb in each workstation but Fah is being the escape goat untill i can perswade my bosses to up the ram (should happen next month when/If big contract is signed off) untill then production will be down.

The 36/41/120 pointer are ok - between 4 and 40mb of ram but I've seen upwards of 110mb on the 400 and 600pointers. Times that by two thread and we have a problem :( not only can I not hide this, but can't justify limiting the uses by half their ram. So production will be down as only going to crunch one thread 9-6 on 80% and none on other 20% of workstations, with two threads going overnight if I'm the last here.

If and when more ram arrives (asked for 1gb per machine) will be back upto speed - should have droped production earlier but wanted to hold off magman as long as possable :D

Also not sure what will happen when electric bill arrives - might loss the weekend and evenings as well - I'll keep you posted
 
If it was me i wouldn't run F@H on those machines at all.

I could have a 350 PC farm if I was prepared to compromise users computing experience but Im not so I don't. I wouldn't say f@h is being made a scapegoat as AutoCAD is actually part of the businesses money making process whereas f@h is not.

Sorry for the least supportive post ever ;)
 
verbal - your 100% right - it's only an issue on the larger WU's and they only been about for the last two weeks - that compined with was very large file sizes of the drawing we're working on currently.

I was only calling F@H a scapegoat because currently XP + Outlook + AutoCad goes over the 500MB limit as it is but yes your point still stands.

Anyway - 350 PC - surely 10% wouldn't hurt :D
 
I think it's fair enough to remove Folding or limit it to small WUs if it's interfering with AutoCAD. But I also think that a business whose work is in a notoriously memory-hungry field should have specced more than 512MB RAM in the first place!
 
Mattus - It's not that simple (is anything)

We has an agreement with Autodesk, the makers of AutoCad that our licence is payed yearly as a subscription and any new version of the software is send to us free (your paying for it in the licience but anyway)

We have no say on the requirements of the software (which keep increasing) so if they issue a new release - like 2007 issued to us about two-three months ago and up the spec are we as a business expected to upgarde all our PC's? (well yes it would seam)

That aside our workstations all meet the recomended requirments for this software (not minimum - recomended) but currently we are noticing that in day to day use under specific (but non unusual) real life situations the software use way in excess of its published spec requirments.

Even with 500mb of dedicated memory it would use more!
This is why I've requested we upgrade the ram now we know their's an issue.

If Autodesk had said we needed 1gb we've has done it then or offset the upgrade untill machines up to spec. That's not the issue, and why should you spend your business profit on overspeced hardware for minimal improvement. Surely you should upgrade only when needed (especially with the speed of computer development) and keep your IT equipment at optermum spec.

Up untill this week we haven't had any problems, now I'm shutting down F@H to minimise the ram overrun, but it's still happening and directors don't want to spend on IT this month so what can I do that I haven't already done???
 
Ahh. I guess the thing is that technology moves so fast. A year or two ago 512 of RAM was quite a lot! It's exactly the same with Windows Vista - a lot of businesses are gonna upgrade to it and then find that it's dog-slow because their machines, which were running fine before, now barely have enough RAM to start up.

At least RAM is pretty cheap these days, though I know how reluctant companies can be to spend money, especially on IT-related things! :)
 
Mattus said:
Ahh. I guess the thing is that technology moves so fast. A year or two ago 512 of RAM was quite a lot! It's exactly the same with Windows Vista - a lot of businesses are gonna upgrade to it and then find that it's dog-slow because their machines, which were running fine before, now barely have enough RAM to start up.

At least RAM is pretty cheap these days, though I know how reluctant companies can be to spend money, especially on IT-related things! :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, most managers have absolutely no idea about computers so trying to tell them that they need more memory is like explaining quantumn physics to a budgie!

SiriusB
 
Actually my bosses are quite cool about it - £250 + Vat to upgrade 8 pc's is very resonable if I do it - was quoted over a grand by others.

Mind you I'm recycling and know the ram slot count on all our mobo's so 5 sticks of 1Gb (or 10x512) should do it and give 7x1Gb and 1x1.5Gb and 768 to a few of the others and still leave slots free
 
This is the same reason i didnt borg any more computers than i have done, the users make use of memory/cpu intensive apps and can't afford/dont want to/cant be bothered/dont see the need to upgrade but still complain about speed :(
 
I sympathise with your problem (honest, really I do (Damn Radio 2, I'm starting to think of songs from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang)).

Aren't the deadlineless WU's a little less memory intensive? It might be worth trying this for a while rather than killing the borgs off completely. I'd rather not see your output reduced, the team and the science need your contributions.

Your lucky in one respect, at least you can borg your computers in work. I work for a major telecoms company and its more than my jobs worth to take advantage of the 10 1.8Gig Celerons that do next to nothing most of the time. I only installed F@H on my works laptop last week and that only because I'm the only person that uses it (and finally figured out how to get F@H work through our firewalls). I don't expect this to last very long either, but its useful while it lasts.

The bulk of my output is from my personal farm (and electricity bill).
 
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