Bitcoin Forum

Hey all

Not a great day on the bitcoin price i have to say..

Just a question is there any benefit in putting multiple machines on 1 workers username or is it better to put each machine on its own?

Thanks

I've asked this question before. I think it comes down to personal preference and your individual situation/needs.

For instance, I mine at btcguild and have just 3 workers(currently) a S1, S2, and S3 worker, hoping to add S5 tomorrow. This works better for me because the graphs are easier to look at, but it makes it harder to figure out which miner may be having problems. If I notice a drop in hashrate I just load up mantmonitor and can identify the problem miner. Or I load up the webgui's manually to find out. Another thing you have to make sure the difficulty you choose is right for the combined miners. If you have multiple S1's and some are underclocked at say 120gh and others are near 200gh, you may want to setup different workers with different difficulties.

I think the only real benefits are that it makes the graphs nicer to look at and it's easier to change over pool info. I use the form-fill dropdowns of previous entries to change pool info faster. So it's easier for me to click on navigator.s1 in the drop down instead of navigator.s1_1, navigator.s1_2, navigator.s1_3, etc... I wasn't able to get mantmonitor's pool change ability to work well for me so I haven't really used it. If I did, I could enter navigator.s1 in my pool info and apply that to all my s1's. I don't really change pool info often so not sure why I'm concerned with this. It does get aggravating entering multiple individual worker names when you have 15+ miners.

Some people may want to view their pool stats while at work or from a mobile. It may be better for those to setup different workers so they can more easily identify which workers are having a problem.

It's best practice to split each physical machine to its own worker.  This allows you to check each worker's performance on the pool interface and your local interface.  It makes pool-side graphs significantly more useful for analyzing potential problems (miner slowing down during the hottest point in the day consistently -> problem with cooling).

It also means, on pools that offer it, you can receive notifications from the pool telling you that a worker has stopped mining.  If you combine multiple machines into one worker, the pool has no idea unless all the machines stopped simultaneously.

Thanks for the reply guys!
As im still a little new to this how do you determine whats the best difficulty to set the miners on and how to you know if its too easy or too hard?

 ??? ??? ???

Thanks

Unless your hardware is having problems, leaving it at default is fine on every(?) pool.  I'm fairly certain every pool offers variable difficulty these days, so your hardware is automatically adjusted to the optimal difficulty.  The only time this doesn't work is with certain hardware which is unable to function at lower difficulties properly, or ignores the pool provided difficulty.  You would know that's happening if your hardware is SIGNIFICANTLY under-performing according to the speed estimate on the pool interface.

It probably is best to just setup individual workers. Last year I was changing pool info often and found it more difficult to type in each worker name multiple times. I've been running at btcguild straight since around last july. Other than the recent short paycoin mining spree. I should probably go back and set them up individual again when I setup my s5's.