Don't let work units reach timeout date. On timeout date, the work unit will join the queue to be sent to someone else (neither person will know if this has happened). After the timeout date, the task will continue to run on your computer until its expiration date, causing a large waste of work and a delay for the entire project. Returning work units in a timely manner is crucial because the next batch of work units depends on the results of the previous batch. If even a small percentage of people are never returning their work, it can take a large number of iterations for all work in a batch to be finished (to finish 1,000,000 work units when only 1% of tasks are never returned, Folding@home will need around 4 times longer to finish all the work units). For this reason, you get more points if you finish earlier. If you see that many of your work units are timing out, please uninstall the software. If you plan on shutting down your computer for a long time, a few days before you will shut it down, set the work unit to "Finish".
The default installation requires you to login to your computer for Folding@home to run. Don't worry, switching users or the "lock screen" are not problems after you have logged in. What this means is, if your computer restarts without automatically logging in (or if there is a long-enough power outage), your computer will pause doing calculations until you login again. Note that the default Linux installation seems to not require a login.
It seems that Folding@home on Windows or macOS blocks automatic sleep from happening (at least for the default installation method and default configuration). Automatic sleep does not seem to be blocked on Linux (perhaps this is a Linux issue rather than a Folding@home issue?), which is bad because I read that, if running GPU tasks, Folding@home does not correctly restart the GPU when coming back from sleep (if you set it to Pause then Fold again, it should fix that work unit). Note that BOINC, another volunteer computing software, never blocks automatic sleep.
After hitting the "Finish" button then having the work unit finish, I was annoyed to discover that, upon restarting my computer, a new work unit was downloaded. It turns out that, regardless of any "Pause" or "Finish" settings, when Folding@home starts up, it starts as "Folding". It turns out that there is an "Expert" pause-on-start setting that can stop this behavior, but then it always starts on pause regardless of if you are on the "Fold" setting! However, this "Expert" setting is useful if you want to pause folding for a few weeks without having to uninstall the software. In the "extra client options" in the "Expert" tab, add pause-on-start set to true. Another way of solving this problem is to uninstall Folding@home being sure to not delete data (not deleting data is the default uninstallation) so that you can quickly bring back all of your old settings when you reinstall the software.
Folding@home recommends to use the default "medium" power setting, which uses 75% of your logical CPU cores and allows for GPU processing. I recommend this too unless you find for some reason that your computer is running too hot. On my primary computer that I actually care about, I set it to "light" (between 25% and 50% of logical cores) to prevent the fan from running too loud and possibly breaking the fan many years from now. On a computer with just 2 physical cores (no hyper-threading), I use "full" setting to be sure that I use 100% of the cores.
2020-04 Update: Due to new tight deadlines, "light" just barely gave my computer's CPU enough time to finish! I needed "medium" and never letting my computer go to sleep. I also had another computer that could not meet deadlines due to it being very slow (though this is not terrible because old computers have bad computational power per watt, so I didn't much want to use it). I don't have any fancy GPUs, so maybe these deadlines are reasonable with GPUs. In 2023-01, deadlines were still tight, though I may have forgotten that you have to wait until the progress is a couple percent for the ETA to be somewhat accurate. In 2024-01, deadlines seem more relaxed!
Sometimes, the first CPU work unit sent to a computer will run with just 1 logical core regardless of your settings. In general, if a power setting allows for only x CPU cores to run, you will download a work unit that cannot run on more than x cores, so increasing the power setting will make no difference for just that work unit (though decreasing the cores works). I haven't tested this much after 2020 when I last observed it.
Other times, the first CPU work unit sent to a computer will contain too much work making the deadline impossible. I and someone on the forums encountered this, which is strange because the forums also say that Folding@home software does not learn and just always matches work with the hardware that you have, so why does the first work unit seem to be different? I haven't tested this much after 2020 when I last observed it.
I recommend the default "While I'm working" setting (not "Only when idle"). The software runs at low priority causing it to basically only use the leftover CPU power, so I've never seen a drop in computer performance at "medium" setting. If you do "Only when idle", you will lose work as it reverts to the most recent checkpoint: every 1% or, for slow machines, every 15 minutes. The 15 minutes can be set to as low as 3 minutes, but saving checkpoints wastes resources, so I don't recommend it.
None of my GPUs are powerful enough to be on the GPU whitelist. Even if your GPU is on the whitelist, it may not get any work if it is not powerful enough. If your GPU works, I highly recommend you keep allowing the folding software to use it! For certain types of calculations such as what Folding does, a GPU can do far faster calculations than using just a CPU. A GPU still requires the computer's "brain", the CPU, to work. All Folding calculations can be done using a GPU, but that doesn't mean that all work units are designed for GPUs because: CPU-only programming is much easier, CPUs without GPUs still make a difference, and powerful GPUs can use a lot of electricity, though, relative to their work output, they get great output per watt. To get a GPU to always run, use "full" setting, and, to get a GPU to run only on idle, you need "medium". If "full" setting noticeably affects computer performance, reduce it! If you can still get it to run, great software is FAHBench to benchmark the CPU and GPU of your computer! Anyway, my experience is that you have to restart your computer after installing Folding@home for any new GPU slot to go from Disabled to Ready (on Windows at least). If that doesn't work and your GPU is on the GPU whitelist, try installing its official GPU drivers. Also, keep in mind that, on Windows, you cannot install Folding@home (or BOINC) as a service (do the default install instead) if you want to use the GPUs.
I much prefer the "Advanced Control" (aka "FAHControl") instead of the "web control" (aka https://client.foldingathome.org/). You can see much more information and access more settings beyond the basic power slider. However, the web control is needed if you want the "only when idle" setting.
On Linux (the fastest operating system), getting anything other than just the fahclient (such as fahcontrol) to install can be tricky (GUIs are tricky). Luckily, the web control link still works with just the client installed, and other settings can be changed by carefully editing a file called config.xml then restarting FAHClient. Because there was no GUI to notify me, I was somewhat surprised when I realized that FAHClient started folding immediately after installing it. On Ubuntu, the following commands were useful (I would rather do restart or stop than pkill and start, but restart or stop don't stop the original process due to some bug, and reload also didn't work)...
FAHClient --help sudo gedit /etc/fahclient/config.xml sudo pkill FAHClient sudo /etc/init.d/FAHClient start
I actually do not use CPUs for Folding@home because I feel that, because of GPUs' good energy efficiency and huge computational power, CPUs are best used towards CPU-only projects on software like BOINC. The CPU slot within Folding@home can be disabled. If you turn off your computer's internet while installing Folding@home, you can disable this slot before it downloads any work (note that there is a bug that makes me disable the slot again if I try to disable it immediately when the settings menu first pops up after initial installation). Though, Folding@home might have certain tasks that are CPU-only that are the only ones given to CPUs, but, unless the project becomes more transparent, they will not get my CPUs.
If I had a whitelisted and powerful GPU to use for Folding@home, I still might not want to run CPUs for even BOINC because I don't want the electrical power draw of CPUs to slow the GPU or overheat the computer or room, especially because the GPUs get more work done per electrical energy. Though, I was analyzing the efficiency (points per kWh) of a newer low-frequency CPU towards Folding@home tasks, and it was almost as good (2/3 as good) as a GPU I was testing! It being AVX2 instead of AVX may have made a big difference (note that, in 2024-01 for a work unit using the a8 Folding core, an AVX-512 computer I tested still said AVX2-256 in the log file). And efficiency would go up if running both CPU and GPU because just idling a computer takes electricity.
Here's a secret: you can abort work units! I discovered that Folding@home will "dump" a work unit if you delete the slot that it can run in! The software does not want you knowing this because some people abort many work units until they find the type that gives them the most points, and I'd expect that, since they track your work-unit return rate, that their servers have other ways of preventing this immature behavior. However, aborting a work unit seems to be the responsible thing to do if you cannot finish it before its deadline, but maybe the servers do not immediately send the aborted work unit to someone else. Note that, with BOINC, you should abort tasks that you cannot finish because the server can then immediately just send them to other people.
From what I can tell, TPF is the time between 1% checkpoints?
To combine points of many computers, make sure to set your identity (name and/or team) to the exact same thing on each computer. Your donor's rank will be 0 until you reach at least 100,000 points.
Speaking of earning points, Folding@home is so successful partly because of their clever marketing campaign. For example, you can select a cause/disease to work on (though your choice does not guarantee that all your resources will go towards the cause). Of course it doesn't much matter what you choose because people who don't choose will get more work for the causes that were least chosen. Unless you really care, I recommend that you do not choose a cause in case not choosing allows the experts more freedom in choosing what to work on. But it makes people feel good to choose, and it doesn't hurt anything for them to "choose". This just goes to show that successfully communicating science requires the use of emotional tricks. Makes me wonder if all logical actions result from emotional tricks perhaps from our own brains.