Behavior of MaxHighMemWorkers in local.txt on P-1 Stage 2

[lisanderke]

Hello, I was wondering what the effect of the MaxHighMemWorkers setting in local.txt exactly is. I've notice the following behavior:


(MaxHighMemWorkers set to 1 and only 2 workers on this machine running P-1)


Worker 1 & 2: both start stage 1 on 108M exponent.
Worker 1: reaches stage 2 init, takes all memory (as expected)
Worker 2: reaches end of stage 1, acknowledges maxhighmemworkers is set to 1, finds low memory worktodo entry, switches to next exponent/worktodo entry and enters stage 1.
Worker 1: (let's assume this one finishes before stage1 of worker 2 completes, otherwise the previous step again ) completes stage 2, now onto next exponent, stage 1.


Both workers are now in stage 1, one will enter stage 2, the other will skip stage 2 if the other hasn't finished yet and will work on the next exponent in the meantime. I've noticed that when stage 2 is skipped, the worktodo entry remains and no work done (only stage 1) is being sent to Primenet.


My question now is; When does P-1 stage 2 of the skipped worktodo entries, with only stage 1 done, start?

My goal for doing this is to use my allocated 22GB of RAM as often as possible. Since I don't lose any throughput running 2 workers over just 1 worker, it would be nice to always have one worker doing stage 2, instead of having 40-60% of the time where no stage 2 is being done (and no ram used)

[MattcAnderson]

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