Is Folding killing my PS3?

[Bnick]

I was going to play the Motorstorm demo this afternoon. I hadn't played it for a while, at least 2 months, and I noticed that the time it took to load the cars for the car select screen was noticeably longer. Like, almost twice as long as it normally takes. It got me wondering: Is folding at home killing my PS3?
I leave it on for about 7 hours a day when I go to school, and I would guess that Folding is very CPU intensive. Is all this constant activity actually weakening the processors? I would think the Mortorstorm problem would be caused by slower RAM, but I don't see how that's possible. Any ideas guys?

[eviltim]

Wow, that sucks about the loading times on Motorstorm.  I don't know about how much stress Folding@home puts the ps3.

[BlazingGamer]

Overkill!?!?!?!

[marshmellow1328]

It shouldn't be "killing" your PS3. I assume it stops running when you go to do other things?? When was the last time you shut your PS3 off?? It's possible Folding has some memory leaks, therefore, even though it's stopped running, it's still taking up some of the memory because it didn't flush all of it upon quitting the program. A simple reboot fixes this.

[Italianstallion]

Yeah, what marsh said, but also, just having the ps3 on for a while would probably get it warm, which depending on how warm it gets, could slow some things down.  I use folding@home alot, but when it is time to play, I usually turn it off for 1-2 hours or so when my ps3 has been on straight for 2+ days, to give it some time to rest up before my gaming session.  This always fixes any possible problems, so it could very well be what marsh said (memory leaks), or a problem with extended "warmness".

As for long term damage, Of course the more hours you have any electric device (or use of any consumer product for that matter) on, the shorter the lifespan is going to be, but I believe that sony makes quality products, so even that shorter lifespan should be long.

And even if my ps3 does go out, that will hurt me financially, but I have already made it a goal of mine to fold 100 work units on my ps3 as my personal donation.