We had another meeting with Sony to discuss the results of our recent server code change to improve the situation. We have a working model of the situation and we will continue to see what we can do server side before the client patch comes out.
We will be testing an approach which means that many clients (99%) won't get assigns for a while, allowing the remaining 1% to get work. Once they have work, they'll go away crunching, allowing a new 1% to get work. If all goes well, all should get work without all pounding the server simultaneously.
The new client will take care of this automatically (as this is already done in the non-PS3 clients), but we will handle this from the Assignment Server "manually" to take care of this until the new client gets out. Once we get over the hump, we should be ok.
A while does not give Folding at Home users enough information. As it is possible from what you are saying 90%+ of us may have machines waiting for units which is a lot of wasted electric being used to do nothing. With the amount of green issues being pushed on us around the world wouldn’t it be more responsible to tell PS3 users to stop crunching until the next update comes out.
Posted by: just4funuk | February 07, 2008 at 09:46 AM
just4funuk, I think that "a while" is going to be as good as we're going to get. If you choose to turn off your PS3s for a day or two until the fix gets rolled out, that would be perfectly understandable. They extended the deadlines on the work units, so you should not lose anything if you choose to shut down temporarily.
Posted by: ploeg | February 07, 2008 at 09:53 AM
My client was "fixed" by update #6, but can't connect to the server for 2 days now. So it's now off, saving some power/carbon/greenhouse gas until Sony rolls out the new client.
Posted by: BuddhaChu | February 08, 2008 at 03:10 AM