Memory vs points?

[orion456]

Is there any points advantage to going from 1 GB to 4 GB when using Rosetta on a quad core?

[Tbrooks]

My 2500K uses between 4 to 6Gig of ram when I am crunching Rosetta and thats a 4core 4 thread machine. My 3930K uses 8 to 9 with 6cores and 12 threads. Ram is so cheap now I would say the more the marrier.

[Bobnova]

My current rosetta WUs take 380-450mb of ram each, running four of 'em with 1gb would be page file hell!

[freeagent]

Ive seen 10gb of ram used in task manager with 12gb installed. You can tell it how much to use on your settings page on the website :salute:

Edit:

I dont use a page file heh..

[orion456]

Ive seen 10gb of ram used in task manager with 12gb installed. You can tell it how much to use on your settings page on the website :salute:



Ah, but the question is: does it make any difference to have more than 2gb of memory. Yes Rosetta seems to claim more if you give it, but do you get a points benefit from supplying 12gb of ram?

[Evilsizer]

the real question is, is the larger memory WU worth more. answer that and that answers your question. if one WU can use 1-2gb, it should be worth more since it will need lots of work time, seems logical to me.

[freeagent]

Ah, but the question is: does it make any difference to have more than 2gb of memory. Yes Rosetta seems to claim more if you give it, but do you get a points benefit from supplying 12gb of ram?

I honestly dont know :(

Ive wrecked my config, the first time I tried Rosetta, this thing was pumping out points, now it does alot of work and I dont get much in return. I have to play with it this weekend :blah:

:D

[xrror]

One thing that having "extra" memory can help with - On the boinc client, under Preferences > disk and memory usage check "Leave applications in memory while suspended"

This helps when the Boinc scheduler gets... "creative" and starts jumping around between tasks for no reason (that I can tell).

I think you can also set this option in the web config if you want ALL of your machines on the account to apply it.

It's not much, but any little bit helps right? :beer:

On my i7-930 (8 virtual cores) going from 6Gb to 24Gb (it was on sale/cheap) made approximately ZERO difference in RAC per unit. It did help though when BOINC went "thrash stupid" with it's scheduler though because of the above setting - however maybe that was just a quirk with the older clients? I haven't "re-tested" lately with newer ones (don't really feel like trying to yank DIMM's jammed under the CPU heatsink).

As for the OP, I think on a dual-core now, you really want at least 2Gb. Some of the P4's I've run (yes you can stop laughing now) 1Gb would just thrash if you tried to do anything else - many times a task would suspend "Waiting for memory" for me. I assume a quad would need at least 3 or 4Gb based on this, but you'd probably want more.

Generally I see Rosetta units take around 500mb of ram with default runtimes? Can others confirm this?

It'd be interesting to see how longer run times affect (or is it effect?) memory usage. Does it?

[orion456]

Well just to add a little fuel to the fire. I noticed on my 8 core i7, when I had max memory set to 70% (of 5.8 GB) it was not using one core. I upped that to 90% and the core came to life. Apparently more memory can make a difference.

[Tbrooks]

With the work units stopping before they finish my ram usage goes up to 95% at times now with 16gig installed