I ever was wondering why my Athlon1GHz had a crunching rate at only 7-8 Mnodes/s. Well its not a hot new system, I agree, but even real oldies like the P-II’s (300-400MHz) I have in my herd were not that far away at around 5 Mnodes/s, and the P-III 700MHz in my HP Omnibook was crunching at almost 10Mnodes/s.
Why the hack was the fastest CPU that slow compared to the others?
Then, although I must have known that earlier, while checking my herd statistics on ‘the Cowboy’ I realised that not all systems were running the same or similar client versions.
The recently installed clients on the P4 and AMD K8 dualcore WIN$ machines were on 2.9013-500, or -498 for the Win98 notebook,
the Linux test system P-II 400MHz has the the most actual client 2.9015-504 and my work horse eComStation was running on … shocked …
ancient 2.9008-490 (a version down from 2004).
But well, it is just a cruncher, a cracker doing some numbers back and forth and around, should not make a big deal…
Ok, lets get the newest from distributed.net.
Said… and done.
Got 2.9015-504 for OS/2 and waited until the next packages were done. Stopped the crunchers, flushed buffers and copied the new client into the directory.
Fired it up and all is well – until I recognised the output….the crunching rate was now up to 13 Mnodes/s – almost double than before.
I have been a damn idiot running that old client for so long … wasting hours of crunching … wasting lots of kWh electricity.
All could have been so much more efficient…
Lesson learned: Always the newest client! Check the download page on distributed.net at least once in a term, if you are running an actual OS.
A very good point!
The Cowboy web site shows what clients you are running on each of your cows. If you click the column header on “Client”, it will sort all the old ones to the bottom of the list. These are the ones you should replace with new versions. The last 3 digits of the version should be “500″ or higher, as of the time of this post.
Most of my older clients are running on computers in California. I live in Washington, about 1200 miles (2000 km) away, so I can’t easily get to them to update the software.