Hi this is Loci from Beta Folders In this video we'll look at how to run
multiple Foldit clients in the windows environment We could subtitle this video
"My desktop and how it got this complicated."
So just quickly we're looking at my desktop and basically I have eight Foldit icons
one through four five through eight
that lets me run up to eight separate clients in eight separate folders
and so we'll look at how I set that up and how you can do the same.
And probably so the first question is "Why would you want to go to all this trouble
and create all this complexity" and there are a couple of different answers to
that.
First is of course, there are multiple puzzles running at the same time
and you can be a soloist and an evolver and so if you
want to do everything you may need to have more than
one client.
Short of getting a bunch of computers, you may
just want to do it on your one computer.
So the second part goes along with that and is that your computer may actually have
multiple processors.
Most recent computers do.
If you're only running one client you can only really use one processor effectively
now you can use a little bit more than that but for the
main CPU intensive folding part each Foldit client can only use one processor.
Really I should say one logical processor.
So that means that if you have, say, a four processor machine
and you are running one client you are letting 75% of your resources go to
waste and if you're running an eight processor machine and you're running
one client, well you're letting 7/8s of your possible
computing power go to waste.
So that's kind of a hint as to why I have eight folders here and that we're looking
at an eight processor machine.
One question that comes out of that is "How do we determine how many processors we
have on a given machine."
And there are several ways to do that.
I'll run through them.
First if you go and open up a command window and I've already done that
and then you type in this lovely little command set PIPE - the pipe character is the vertical
bar and find the word PROCESSOR in quotes and
run that and you can see that gives us back a variable called NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS and
it happens to be 8 on this system
so that's one text based way to determine how many processors you have
another way to determine the number of processors and this applies to all versions of windows
I'm looking at Windows 10 here but you have the equivalent thing on older
versions as well so if you right-click on your task bar
I've set my task bar to auto-hide so that's why it seems a little shy
and start task manager and I've already started task manager
and if you look on the performance tab you'll see that there's a lovely graph of
CPU and that's showing eight little graphs here meaning
that I have eight little logical processors.
Eight cores, or eight CPUs, it's possible you'd see
only one graph here and so if I go to change graph
to overall utilization you may see only the one big graph
so to change that you right click on the graph
and select logical processors instead.
That way you see the eight logical processors and they're
pretty busy Okay so that's the second way to look at that.
Third way is something called process explorer from sysinternals
It's actually available from Microsoft.
Got that running here too.
That's sort of a replacement for Task Manager It has a lot more features
So here you can see I've got a bunch of Foldit clients running
on the system at the moment and most of them are
playing a little bit over twelve and a half percent some of them are as high as thirteen
some of them are a little bit lower so again with an eight processor system
four processors it'd be 25% each eight processors it'd be 12.5% each
each of these clients actually has multiple threads
which are like little programs within a program and each of those threads can use a little
bit more CPU but there will be a main thread that will
use most of the CPU power
and as a matter of fact, we can look at that so if we right click on one of the busy Foldit
clients select properties you can see its CPU usage
on the performance graph here but what is more interesting
is the threads tab.
So there we go- there you see on the threads tab
that we have one thread that's using almost that 12.5%
sometimes we'll have another thread that kicks in for
a short while but usually there's just that one thread that's
using almost all the CPU and that corresponds to 100% of one of your logical processors
If we click on this graph up here this will show me my 8 processors or it may
show me one big graph and I just use this checkbox
down here or the other way to see that is to
view system information and again that gives me the same graph and
I can look at different aspects or look at
each of the resources separately so that's process explorer.
OK so once you know how many processors you have
you know how many clients you can run without things
slowing down too much.
Even though I have an eight processor system I usually like to run no more than seven clients
at one time because as we've seen sometimes a client
will get a little busy and you'll have two busy threads
in a client so using two logical processors also I like to be able to use my system for
other things.
So I kind of reserve that eighth logical processor for
whatever else I'm doing and for the occasional needs of the
Foldit clients that are running.
The reason you can't run more Foldit clients than you have
logical processors?
Just everything will slow down.
I like each client to run about as quickly as it can
get as much work done in as little time as it can.
So back to my desktop and how it got this way.
So what I like to do - this is my system is I have one directory Foldit here. Each individual
client is a folder under that directory.
I have this one Foldit demo on the desktop and if we look at the properties for that
we can see it's actually this C foldit Foldit 2015 07 08
So now the nifty thing about Foldit is that on Windows its almost what I would call a
"portable installation" in that you can just copy your
installation folder and not have to worry about things
and generally speaking, that's just fine.
The only area you'd see an issue is if you go uninstall
the client then the uninstaller that's built by the install
program is going to be wrong if you do this copying thing.
Generally you're not going to want to uninstall just
install and install again.
To make a new Foldit client what I would do is simply
go up here to an existing one like this one that I called Foldit demo
and then I'll right click on that and just drag it down to a blank spot and
let go then I get a context menu
because it was a right click and drag I'll just say, copy here.
That will pop up a lovely window that goes pretty quickly
despite being a busy system and voila!
I have a copy.
So then I can just click on that, rename it and I'll call it
Foldit New Demo So then I had icons on my desktop and the
way I got those icons is again by just dragging things
around so I'm going to just drag that folder
to my desktop first of all
and say create shortcut here that gives me a shortcut
to that folder I created and I'll highlight that folder
I'll hit F2 to rename and I'll change it to be
view Foldit New Demo I can go back to windows explorer
Back into that directory and I'll locate foldit.exe
again I'll right click and drag that toward the desktop
select create shortcuts here and voila!
A shortcut.
Once again I will hit F2 and rename it to Foldit New Demo
And the other thing is my editor shortcut I use good old VIM, my favorite editor.
Back from the Stone Age.
Since I have these existing shortcuts set up
I can just drag one down here and say copy here
and I will indeed, get a copy.
I'll say edit Foldit New Demo again I'm just F2 to rename
And typing in the new part.
That's more or less consistent with what I did.
Now since I copied that existing shortcut what I want to do
is go into properties and that still has the old folder in it
so I'll just try typing the new name and it finds it right away
and there we are.
The target here depends on your editor.
What I'm telling my editor is called gvim.exe is the name of
the actual program and I'm telling it to just go after scriptlog
star dot xml so anything that's named
script log something dot XML so that will pick up the script logs from all the
tracks in this client as it so happens I only use the default track I don't
actually use tracks and so there's normally only one script log in the
directory so now well one issue that you still have with this is all my Foldit
clients are going to kind of look alike when they're running and so you can
see over here on the numbers one through eight I've given them custom icons so let's take a
look at how to do that. So to create a custom icon I use a program called
IcoFX - this is the free program that I found and I installed the portable
version of it and then you can just move around without having to worry about the
windows registry or anything like that what you can do is open up an existing
icon file and it's my previous directory actually let's go up to Foldit New
Demo and there's an icon in there then you can just grab the text tool here
start to type you can pick a font and tons of font pick something like
Arial Black. I want to go for the maximum size and just type in the
letters in the let's say - oops, that's no good so I'm going to do that again and
I'll switch these colors and try that again okay not too bad and then I'm
gonna just want to drag that text to be as large as possible and make it
really clear what we're dealing with here
ok so that's not too bad and so the trick of an icon file is that you have
multiple resolutions and at least using this tool you have to do the same thing
at each resolution.
So there I have all my resolutions. I'll just say save and then I'll just put that window down and now you notice we're
still using the same default Foldit icon here so to actually get that stick you
have to go in properties, say change icon. It seems to have the right icon there but
actually you have to browse and now we're seeing the one with my latest update so
basically windows does something strange is that there's some kind of cache there
doesn't pick up that icon change right away
ok so now it's seeing the modified icon on the desktop here and if I startup
program and voila! There it is through the magic of television and so now if I
minimize this and go down to my taskbar I also see the smallest resolution of that
icon there in the taskbar so having that custom icon makes it easy to know which
client is which one you're you're running multiple clients
ok so that's basically a quick version of why my desktop got to be this
complicated and how you can do it yourself.
This does raise a couple of questions about maintaining this
somewhat complex setup so let's go back to Windows Explorer here and what I
actually like to do is periodically go through and when everything is shut down
I go through and delete all these clients folders now keep this one called
Foldit repository and I would never delete that one but the other ones are
fair game then I have reinstalled the client from a fresh download from the
website and then I copy it over and basically create this same folder
structure again and so just a couple of things that you have to worry about that
one of them would be your custom Foldit.ico so if you have that custom icon you may want
to save that so you don't have to redo the work of
editing that again and then the second part is your all dot macro
file that contains all your recipes but I like to do with that I use this Foldit
a repository client as my one IRC connect client so that the clients that
use for in-game chat and I also use that to maintain my recipe file and
and things like that and so we go back to Windows Explorer and go up to here to
this folder level I have various the batch files that just copy the all dot
macro file so this is just a simple batch file that copies the all macro
file from Foldit repository and will copy it up to my network drive and here
it will copy it to each of my eight game playing clients and we'll just
pause at the end so I could see what it did to that there weren't any errors
aside from all dot macro the other file that you may want to keep around this
options dot txt and that has all the various Foldit settings in it one of the
most important is the update group so here this is set to "devprev" so you
can also have the update group of Main or experimental basically the three
files that I worry about whatever replacing these folders is the Foldit
dot ICO the Foldit icon file the all dot macro file and again I just
maintain those from a single source and that never gets replaced and that
the options dot text and you can always just copy options dot text from a
client that where you're happy with all the different option and the main
reason that you want to do that we'll go back to the folder here if you scroll
down a bit there are a lot of these file solution
files that end up lying around so you may have some of them with
time signatures in them here in the main folder for your client and then if you
drill down under the puzzles folder pick up the particular puzzle and you'll see
more higher solution files in there those can end up taking a lot of space
and so it's just good to get rid of once in awhile and good to get rid of
whatever other junk accumulated in your folder and there you go that's basically
the quick introduction to how I run multiple clients in the windows
environment.
I hope this helps, and keep on folding!
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