Bitcoin Forum

I've noticed I'm fluctuating between 3-7% stale shares when mining through my pool.

What is a "normal" stale share rate? I figure if enough of us post, we'll be able to figure out what other people are getting and thus define "normal."

Please post your stale share % and your mining pool (if applicable). Thanks! :)

I'll start:

~5%
btcguild

ran for approx 10 hours: 3732 shares accepted, 19 rejected. That's 0.5%. Using phoenix in BTCmine.

I'm getting right around that using poclbm for BTCMine, as well.

Edit: Of 1450 last shares on my two 5850s running on this comp @ ~350 MH/s each, I have 5 recorded stales. ~.34%

66 out of 18229 = 0.36% at Deepbit atm.

It absolutely depends what you are mining with.  Slower hardware will get more stale shares.

I have a 4650 that mines at about 22MH/s, and it gets 7% stale shares.  But my 5850 gets 0.36% stale shares.  Regardless, if you're using deepbit, he pays you for those stales anyway.

BTC Guild Also pays for stales if you donate 2.5% or higher.

Oh, that's interesting.

My 5% rate was with a 5770 at around 150 MH/s

Perhaps the stale rate from Deepbit is so high because blocks are solved much quicker? 5% seems very high.

Yeah, that's what I'm realizing... O.o

No, that's global. If global hashrate goes up, blocks are found faster, thus drop shares increase regarding your hashing output. The size of a single pool doesn't influence that, since you'll drop a share once a block is found anywhere else in the network, for the pool has to build up a new block header.

Oh. I wasn't aware that new work starts on a block whenever anyone finds a block on the network. That makes way more sense than how I was thinking about it. Thanks for the info. Maybe the OP's client doesn't support long-polling, then?

Would it be better than to donate 2.5% if I am receiving ~2% stales shares?
Rather than donate 0% and receive 2% stales?

are you overclocking too high? "over" overclocking can generate bad hashes and thus drive up the invalid/stale percentages

I am currently at: 0.76% (544 stales on 71018 shares) mining on BTCGuild. Hashrate around 1200 MHash

I just started mining this week and saw a remarkable drop in my stale rate this weekend, was +1% on thursday/friday. Could this be caused by the drop in network traffic on my internal network ?

I guess I will see tomorrow when the traffic starts building again :)

getworks shares rejected
815   733   3.96%

My stale data: 1.26% currently.

I thought it's only for invalid blocks?

I'm also seeing a strong correlation between the quality of hardware and rate of stales.

I.e., the faster the card is, the less stales it gets. One of my 6990's has 0.11% stales on 1 core and 0,23% on the other.

Then there's 5770's and  5830's with 2% stales.

Currently I have 27046 shares accepted and 13 stales. That's 0.048% stale.

On a much slower machine I have 40 shares accepted and 0 stales. Will have to let it run longer before the numbers really say anything.

Two theories as to why this is so low:
1. I'm mining in my new mining pool which is still very small. The biggest pools may take a little longer to notify all users by long polling.
2. My miner software stops work on outdated data immediately when it is notified by long polling. Not sure if all miners do this. If your miner doesn't do this, then slow hardware would generate many stales.

34k shares .85% stale 5770 @ ~210MH/s Deepbit prop

Earlier I was running a pair of NVIDIA 450gts cards, each was running at about 30MH/s with a stale rate of 5-6%

In one case you're paying out 2.5% while in the other you're not getting (losing) 2% so yea, you're better off losing the 2% instead of the 2.5% unless you want to be a nice guy :)

I get 2.5% stales with Phoenix, mining at bitcoins.lc
Running a 5850.

I own 5850, 5970 and 6870 cards, and they all have about 1-1.2% stales, measured over several weeks of running.

my 4x) 5830 rig gets < 1% stales

my 2 4x) 6870 rigs get ~2%

all three rigs on btcguild