Always the latest client!
June 3rd, 2008I 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.




