Guide: Setting up notfred in VMWare Player

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Nessus85

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errr - meant to say two vm's going at 4300ppd each :) Now if I can just get winafc to recognize my vmware session.....
 
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Zero82z

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PuppeteerNessus said:
Well, I actually think I figured out most of my problem. I don't remember ever having to open the vmx file in wordpad and editing it but it was set to 2 processors so I changed that to 4 and now have 2 VM's going at about 4300ppd.
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Well, the .vmx file only has to be changed when using 4-core VMs, so if you were using 2-core VMs previously, you never would have had to worry about that.
 
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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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PuppeteerNessus said:
Windows 7 = Yes, pro 64bit

VMware version = Player.
Click to expand...

which version of play because if its a 3.0 release I would like to know.

Also for some reason for Win7 w/ Workstation 7 I could not get winAFC to work right, so I have switched to Bill2's Process Manager....its much nicer.
 
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nitrobass24

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Ok yea just download Bill2's process manager

Its actually much more configurable.
 
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nitrobass24

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I created two Groups
SMP
"Use full path" NOT checked
Set Priority to Idle
Set affinity for 1-8

GPU
"Use full path" NOT checked
Set Priority to High
Set affinity for 1-8

I have those options set on both the Normal Window tab as well as the minimize/hidden window tab.

Then find your process
ala VMware-vmx, right click, create rule, then choose your SMP group.
 
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Mr. Pedantic

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Well, the .vmx file only has to be changed when using 4-core VMs, so if you were using 2-core VMs previously, you never would have had to worry about that.
Click to expand...
You want to change memory usage as well. I think it defaults to 512MB; for best results it's advised to use 1024MB or more.
 
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nitrobass24

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Anyone had problems lately with the VM running out of diskspace?
I used to get the error on the VM's console but it would keep trucking along.
Now the VMs hang.

How much disk space are yall alloting?
 
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Nessus85

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Wow, I had read that you could use up to 16 cores on ONE vm workstation with the new workstation 8.0 and they would be implementing it in vm player 3. Well, after realizing that I did infact have vmware player 3.0, I decided to give it a shot. And sure enough, works like a charm :) Sorry if this is old news but i think its pretty cool :) I have one vmware player session on my i7 and it is getting 8700ppd!
 
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Mr. Pedantic

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Wow, I had read that you could use up to 16 cores on ONE vm workstation with the new workstation 8.0 and they would be implementing it in vm player 3. Well, after realizing that I did infact have vmware player 3.0, I decided to give it a shot. And sure enough, works like a charm Sorry if this is old news but i think its pretty cool I have one vmware player session on my i7 and it is getting 8700ppd!
Click to expand...
I was wondering about that, and after what you posted I decided to try it out. Now my VM is running with 8 cores as well (well, really 7 and a bit, with the other core going to the GPU).

EDIT: Take a look at these times:

Code: 
[18:09:55] Completed 57500 out of 250000 steps  (23%)
[18:12:59] Completed 60000 out of 250000 steps  (24%)
[18:16:00] Completed 62500 out of 250000 steps  (25%)
[18:18:51] Completed 65000 out of 250000 steps  (26%)
[18:22:09] Completed 67500 out of 250000 steps  (27%)
[18:25:02] Completed 70000 out of 250000 steps  (28%)
[18:27:50] Completed 72500 out of 250000 steps  (29%)
[18:30:06] Completed 75000 out of 250000 steps  (30%)
[18:32:18] Completed 77500 out of 250000 steps  (31%)
[18:34:35] Completed 80000 out of 250000 steps  (32%)
[18:36:46] Completed 82500 out of 250000 steps  (33%)

Especially the last 3 frames...12442ppd!! :eek:

And 12663 on the last frame...

These are with a single VM, using 1792MB of memory, on a Core i7 920 clocked at 3.6GHz with the GPU client running as well.

I might raise the memory allocation a bit more, see how high it can go...
 
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Zero82z

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I'll just restate myself here for those who missed it in the other thread:
Zero82z said:
Too good to be true. We tried this a while back with running 2-core VMs on one core each. Although the reported PPD numbers are large, that's because they're based on the log file frame times which are in turn based on the system clock of each VM. When you allocate a VM with a certain number of cores to a smaller amount of real cores, the system clock in that VM runs slower than real time which gives the illusion that it's more efficient than it really is.
Click to expand...
 
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404 - File not found

Gawd
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everyone folding 24/7 with i7@3.8 (or something faster) coupled with 4gb ram+ should switch to bigadv units, you will double your ppd.
 
T4rd

T4rd

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Ok, I have some issues with notfred that I might need to make a new thread for, but I'll try here for now.

Here's my VM setup: Win7 64-bit, i7 @ 3.36 ATM, 6GB RAM, running one VM with 4 threads/cores configured for it.

Issue 1: For some reason, the VM is killing my internet connection by maxing out my upload ISP cap constantly. I can see this because I have a custom firmware on my Linksys router (DD-WRT) that shows all LAN, WLAN, and WAN bandwidth usage. My ISPs upload cap is 512 Kb/s and my WAN outbound traffic stays there until I close or disconnect my VM, then immediately goes down to 0 outbound traffic. This is not happening while uploading a completed WU because FahMon shows it's still in the middle of working on a WU. It's also no CPU usage because priority on it is "Idle" and I can ping my router with 1ms times constantly (as was the issue with someone else that recently had this issue).

Issue 2: Notfred is only using 2 or 3 cores half of the time, only sometimes will it use all 4 cores/threads as I've assigned to it through the folding.vmx file in Wordpad and also through WinAFC.

folding.vmx config: "numvcpus = "4""
WinAFC affinityinput.txt config: "*\vmware-vmx.exe := ALL [assign=4,priority=idle]"

Issue 3: About once a day, the VM stops and gives me some errors. I've gotten two different ones so far, I keep forgetting to get a screenshot of it, but one of them I just got about 30 mins ago. It was giving me an error that pretty much said "not enough memory" even though I have "1024" configured for the VM in the folding.vmx file and I have no less than 3GBs of physical RAM left at all times. I wish I had gotten the exact error for this, but will post back with it if it happens again soon.

Edit: One of the errors says
"attempt to access beyond end of device
hda1: rw=1, want=2096304, limit=2088387"

But it seems to still be folding after this error, so I don't know if I should worry about it.

Thanks for any help you all can provide :).

Made thread here.
 
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HighYield

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I have a general VMware question for everyone. Is it currently better to be using the VMware Workstation RC (October build 197124) or switch to the released version of VMware player 3.0? I also have noticed my internet connection is suffering from latency problems lately, but I haven't traced it back to the VM at this point - too lazy :)
 
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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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Couple of questions:

1. How do I use the -SMP8 flag in notfred?
2. How do I set -bigadv flag in notfred?
 
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