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Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] writes:

If you are a F@H contributor, you may have noticed that you aren't getting your normal allotment of work units. It appears to have started sometime Friday, March 13. And, the root cause, are schools shutting down around the United States.

Kids are scared (some more, some less) of the Coronavirus, they read something somewhere about efforts such as FAH that are working on curing various diseases. Those kid's gaming rigs are exactly what FAH and other similar research groups need. And, some of those kids have machines that most of us would envy! A well built gaming machine is simply awesome!

https://foldingforum.org/viewforum.php?f=61 [foldingforum.org]

That forum is filled with newbs trying to figure out how to set up FAH on their machines, and then complaining that they can't get a work unit.

This post, specifically, explains that the huge influx of volunteers has depleted the available work units. https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=32424 [foldingforum.org] Apparently, on Friday, the staff filled the WU servers' caches with the normal amount of WU's and they were gone by early Saturday morning. Someone volunteered to work on Saturday to refill the caches, which were promptly emptied out again.

One of the posts on the FAH forum suggests that FAH has about 4 times the number of folders that it had a week ago.

If you find yourself unable to download a WU, take a look at the log. You will probably find complaints,
"No WUs available for this configuration" and/or "Port 8080 unreachable, trying port 80" and/or "no http service available".

Those and more are all related to the fact that the servers are being hammered by half a zillion school kids who are looking for something useful to do with their time, and their computers.

Be patient, and just let your client work through it. It will eventually download a work unit, crunch it, and return it. We can probably expect this situation to continue for at least two weeks.

Original Submission