[davidflas]

I am getting 20-22 hour work unit crunches on my G4/466 and that seems kind of long. I have 384MB of ram and am running MacOS 9.1. I always launch the application manually and don't rely on the screen saver to kick in. Any suggestions?

[chris v]

I managed to decrease my time by setting the screensaver to go to a blank screen after 1 or 2 minutes, which I don't think it will do if you launch it manually. Basically, the proccessor power that's needed to re-draw the graphics is turned over to data crunching once the screen goes blank, and it works a lot faster.
You can enable the screenaver instantly by throwing the cursor down to the lower left corner (default--you can pick a corner in prefs) whenever you get up from the machine.

Try that, and you should see your times decrease to ten or twelve hours, which is what I get on my Cube 450 (when it's not running RC5)

CV

[reader50]

I get better time than that on my G4 350. And I use it as an application too. Windowshade the application. Letting it run "open" slows it down a lot.

Get in the habit of leaving the windowshaded application in the foreground whenever you leave your computer. When in the background, the application only grabs 5% or so of the CPU.

Use a RAM disk. And if you crash a lot, get in the habit of backing up that RAM disk. There is little that is more frustrating than wasting hours finishing a unit you have already done.

[davidflas]

thanks for the suggestions guys, I'll give it a try.

[davidflas]

I tried keeping the Seti window in window shade mode and it shaved about 10 hours off my crunch times. Thank guys, the advice really helped!