Bitcoin Forum

Hello

I am trying to figure out my monthly data usage for my mining operation.
Does any one know how much data is used per Mhash?
I am switching from an unstable internet source to something more stable.
The downside is I will have a data cap, so I have to chose what size of plan to use
Thanks all

Getwork was a bit more of a bandwidth hog in the old days, especially on fast miners. With the Stratum protocol, bandwidth was reduced significantly, since it's using a persistent TCP stream and sending condensed messages.

An average Stratum work push is about 1 KB. Most pools push work every 30 seconds, which means you're at 16 kilobits per minute downstream, roughly 273 BITS per second.

Submitting a share on Stratum is [roughly] 80 bytes of data. With a variable difficulty pool, you're looking at 12-30 shares per minute depending on the pool. Using the highest (30 SPM), that translates to 2.4 KB uploaded per minute, roughly 330 BITS per second.

The pool then responds with the status of your share, roughly 50 bytes, which would be 1.5 KB per minute, or 200 BITS per second.

Grand total with Stratum: Upstream is ~330 bits per second. Downstream is ~500 bits per second.  That is 101 megabytes uploaded per month, and 154 megabytes downloaded per month.

These are using above average estimates/approximations. Pool settings, the size of the block being hashes, etc., can make these numbers higher or lower, but generally lower.  This bandwidth is per Stratum connection.  cgminer opens one connection per machine (or per cgminer instance launched).  poclbm requires one per GPU I believe.  If you have a large farm, you can combine all of your machines into a single connection by using the Stratum proxy from slush (https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy).  When using the proxy, the above data rates are roughly the same regardless of how many machines you have, as long as the pool is utilizing variable difficulty.

This other thread might be relevant: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131035.0