How many clients in Folding@Home?

[marcos]

I've been reading some threads about Fedora@Home and noticed some guys are running more than one client in a single machine. I remember reading somewhere that Stanford project doesn't recommend using more than one client per cpu.
So where is the truth? Can I optimize my folding work by running more than one client? If so, how many clients should I run simultaneously? Is there any significant difference between running one client and more than one?
As far as I know, my CPU usage is 100% using just one client, so I suppose I'm already giving all my processing capacity to the project. Am I right?

That's my configuration: FC3, P4 Prescott, 3 Ghz, 1Gb (ram). (Although I've got a Prescott, I never pulled off to run the smp kernel)

Thank you guys.

Marcos

[JordanN]

You can run more than one instance: just put each instance in its own folder (it uses the folder while workings, so they need to be seperate) and change the machine ID in the configuration file.

[marcos]

Originally Posted by greenlead

You can run more than one instance: just put each instance in its own folder (it uses the folder while workings, so they need to be seperate) and change the machine ID in the configuration file.

Thanks greenlead but I know that.

[skoona]

Running more than one client per real cpu is a waste of effort on traditional platforms. The debate on SMP kernels and HyperThreading has also been discussed and explored. No more than one client per real cpu (hyper threading is only 1 cpu).

A simple test is to time and run two clients, then time and run one client twice. Assuming you could get the same WU for each test run - you would find that the times for the two test would be equal. Also, the serial test at least produced a completed workunit before the parrallel test did.