Mining service is back up again. Apologies for the downtime.

I had to extract some data before restarting it. Working on the issue now.

Sorry, website back up. I moved the website to a new server a couple days ago, and it seems to be triggering a bug in third party software i am using. That's how some concurrency bugs are. Trying to find a solution for it.


The BFL ASICs should work fine. Untested on minirigs though. They use a link between cards in the rig with a way to send commands to individual cards. That part hasn't been tested yet.

The ASICminer devices.. I don't know. Not easy to get communicate with those guys, I guess they are too busy. But I read somewhere that the USB device works like an Icarus FPGA, and those are supported in BitMinter client. So it may work. I would certainly like to hear about it if someone gets a chance to try it out.

Apologies for the minutes of downtime on the mining server that just occurred. I'm starting to figure out what the problem is, though. Looks like a memory leak in a third party library. It was causing some confusing symptoms. Working on a solution for this.


Payments have been going out steadily and still are, if you mean to your off-bitminter wallet?

Having some trouble with deadlocks in a third party library on the website. Luckily I've caught it quickly so far so the downtime has been short.

I'm looking for a way to prevent this issue from occurring.

Thanks for the kind words


That's one of the top priority items now.

Website was having an issue. Fixed now.

Apologies for the downtime.

Maldark, keep in mind that as more and more machines start mining the difficulty will keep going up, and the 5 GH/s will give you less and less bitcoins.

The two delays have been almost the same for the last few weeks. Why do you feel the delay has gotten longer?

Having work in the current incomplete shift means you get paid after the shift is completed. Having work in the last 10 completed shifts means you get paid now if blocks are found. If you have a pile of work in the current shift, then you'll get paid later.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it

And yeah, web sessions timing out is intentional. It's a long timeout though, much longer than most sites that handle money. I know it's annoying to get logged out of the livestats. Maybe I can get that to keep working, but still time out sessions so someone else can't cash out your bitcoins if you forgot to log out.

It's on my list.


I just restarted the mining backend to get an update in. Now it can recover by itself from some types of failure. It should also be better able to handle stormy internet weather disrupting communications between bitminter servers in different data centers.

More stability improvements coming soon..

BitMinter had less bad luck than Slush the week that just ended. Looks like BTCguild had very bad luck 6 weeks in a row - not what I call flying with luck. But yes, it seems to be finally turning around for them today. The pool that stands out is actually Itzod with some crazy good luck recently.

More fun statistics: http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the info, guys.

I also see bitcoind driving one CPU core at 100% for 1-3 seconds. That happens several times per minute. Looking at the log before and as it happens, the only thing I see is new transactions being received.

And yeah, memory usage is much much higher than it used to be.

Maybe I should try the latest from git. I don't like running code that hasn't seen much testing, though.

Sorry, we just had a couple minutes of downtime again. bitcoind 0.8.1 seems to be a real cpu and memory hog sometimes, never saw such issues with 0.7.2. Going to try to free up more resources on the server where it runs.


Yeah, I'll probably make that the way it is sorted.


That's coming.

We just now had a dip in our luck, but before that it was average for a good while, going a little above and a little below at times.

Could it be related to the (currently) 4 hours 40 minutes delay for work to get paid through 10 shifts? Or the 20 hour delay for confirmations if not using the prepay perk?

Apologies for the downtime.

One of the servers ran into low memory issues. Seems everything is happening today at once. I'll be working to improve stability during the next few days.

Welcome new guys, thanks for the praise


What do you mean? We are doing pretty average right now, finding the expected number of blocks. Where did you get the 30% from?

And no, BTCguild isn't taking anyone's blocks. That's not how mining works.

Was seeing some very heavy traffic there for a moment. Seems better now.

That's right. Orphaned blocks at BitMinter are what other pools show as orphan or "invalid". The stale blocks at BitMinter are of a type not shown at any other pools as far as I know. Yes, when a worker sends in stale work that could have created a block, that's listed as a stale block. Perhaps this is only demoralizing and should be hidden from the users, like other pools do.

A lot of miners don't understand that BitMinter has one of the very highest payouts you can get from a pool. If the payouts are among the very best but some users think they are among the worst, then I definitely need to do something about how data is presented on the website.


Yeah, getting 20 confirmations takes about 20 hours. That's needed if you have the prepay perk turned off. Also there is the PPLNS delay. For your work to be fully paid the shift they are recorded in must be finished, plus 10 more shifts. An average of 10.5 shifts. Currently shifts take about 27 minutes, so that's a delay of about 4 hours and 40 minutes from the work is done until it is fully paid. So yes, without prepay the total delay from doing work to getting full pay is currently 24 hours and 40 minutes.

Having half the expected income when half your work has been paid sounds correct.


Yep, that's coming soon.

Congrats


Did it leave a hs_err_pid file on the desktop? Are you running Catalyst 13.1 or 13.4? Many users had problems with those crashing. And sometimes they only crash with certain miners.

Is there a hs_err_pid file on desktop? That's usually caused by the graphics drivers crashing. People had a lot of problems with Catalyst 13.1 and some also with 13.4.


No, the only supported FPGAs are BFL and Icarus. I guess many will be upgrading their Lancelot to Avalon, so it doesn't make much sense to spend time adding support for Lancelot anymore.