Mprime questions...
 

What compiler is used to compile mprime? Would the [url=http://www.intel.com/software/products/compilers/clin/]Intel[/url] compiler be a worthwhile investment?

What optimizations are used? If just the basic optimizations are used, does using some of the more "dangerous" ones make much of a difference in speed?

I know how to run mprime from a cron job... How can I do that *and* send everything you'd normally see with "mprime -d" to a file?

On a headless, dedicated box, should mprime be installed in /usr/local? What user should run it via cron?

Given that Linux has less stuff running can I expect work to be done faster on a non-X Linux box versus a Windows box?

Thanks!

On the same hardware, LINUX seems to run a hair faster - but it's not a big difference if you don't have a lot of "extra" stuff running on the Windoze box.

Especially under NT (I can't speak to XP or 2k).

I thought the major Prime code was written in assembler? If so, a compiler change won't have a noticeable effect if any at all.

I start up my mprime detached with a line like this

(cd /mersenne ; exec ./mprime -d > /dev/tty10 2>&1) &

You should be able to put that as a single commend inside a chrontab line, substituting a file name for the /dev/tty10

I see no reason for mprime to have to go into /usr/local - seems to be a personal preference thing. I don't mess around with having multiple users on a dedicated cracker box, so I have no idea what user to put if you don't use root as the user. I'd guess that it would have to be a user with execute and read privilages to the executable, and read and write to the directory the other config/intermediate files are stored in.

Quint is right. My crontab line reads something like this

1 0 * * * cd /path/to/mprime; ./mprime -d >> log.txt &

That works just beautifully. Yeah every day I get an extra line in my log.txt saying "another mprime running " but that's okay :)

While I'm thinkinsg about it - why run mprime from cron in the first place on a headless dedicated box?

I'd think it would be more efficient to just put it into rc.local for startup on bootup (or equivilent for non-Slackware distributions)?

Most of my dedicated crackers I don't even bother installing cron on any more - it doesn't eat a LOT of CPU cycles, but it does eat SOME....

[quote="QuintLeo"]While I'm thinkinsg about it - why run mprime from cron in the first place on a headless dedicated box?[/quote]
If mprime stops for whatever reason cron will restart it... You can't do that with a script in rc.local...

IMO, the interval for cron should be one hour or less... The cycles cron uses is negligible... Losing mprime output for a possible 23 hours and 59 minutes is a bigger problem...

I have mprime launched a boot-time by init, with this line in the inittab:

prim:2345:boot:/var/mprime/mprime -B

I'm not sure why you'd want cron restarting mprime if it keeps crashing. When mprime dies with no error (usually due to seg fault) I take it as an indication my results are becoming corrupt.