I'm not suggesting that you don't try to figure out why this is happening... but you can use CGWatcher to handle these types of problems so you don't have to wake up to restart cgminer. Also check Windows Event Viewer for application errors when this happens and post the error information, it may be helpful in diagnosing the problem.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=185553.0

http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgwatcher.html

ajw107: 1.2.9 is available now and should fix the problem you were having with config file paths including spaces. Thanks for reporting this.

I wouldn't say 330 Kh/s is horrible for a 7850, but it could be better. The highest reported on the wiki is 411 Kh/s.

Also OP, play with intensity as well when tweaking. There is usually a "sweet spot" for a given config. For example, I get better hashrates on by 7950s config with intensity 13 than I do at intensity 15. Obviously you'll want to find the best settings for intensity 19 or 20 since you're not going to be using the computer... just a reminder that intensity is another variable in tweaking and depending on the other settings, higher may not always be better.

I'm not sure what options GUIMiner is adding on its own. This is a situation where having the miner visible would be helpful because you could use cgminer's menu to save the config out to a file so you could see exactly what it is using. Is there an option in GUIMiner to show the miner's window? Or to output exactly what it used to launch the miner?

Thanks, I'm always open to suggestions. I'll number the answers to make it easier...

1. coinwarz, last I checked, did not offer data in json/xml/plain text format, meaning I'd have to scrape the page... something I'd like to avoid because if anything is changed it could potentially cause the scrape to be inaccurate. This is still on the to-do list, as others have requested including trading volumes for each coin. So I'm not ruling out scraping altogether, but I haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

2. As you saw, you can use decimals to set intervals less than one hour.

3. Phone apps have always been on the to-do list, but not until CGRemote is finished. For me personally, I'd rather use my laptop or a desktop if I want to manage all of my miners at once (although that may be because my LG phone is plagued with random crashes), which is why I started working on CGRemote first. I think more often than not, people want to use phones to check that the miners are still working properly... something CGWatcher does for you. With scheduling you can set it up to mine what and when (admittedly there were some scheduling issues in 1.2.8 that are fixed in 1.2.9), so CGRemote is great for managing your miners when you want to do things like:

    - creating a new profile and pushing it out to selected miners at once
    - changing configs on selected miners at the same time
    - changing selected miners to mine specific profiles
    - changing selected miners to mine a specific coin at any given time, overriding previously scheduled switching
    - adding scheduled actions to selected miners all at once
    - everything CGWatcher can do, but for all of your miners in one window (or separate windows if you prefer to open the individual miner windows)

These are things you would probably prefer to do on a computer, though don't get me wrong phone apps are on the list of things to do. I just run out of hours in the day.

4. When using the failover strategy in cgminer, it will automatically use the first priority pool and change to a backup pool if the first one is down, and so on until it finds one that works. The Pools tab in CGWatcher just gives you some additional controls and information regarding your pools.

5. There is an option for this in the Settings tab: "Miner window mode". I never did it by default because I was unknown on the forum when I first released CGWatcher and didn't think running the miner hidden was a good strategy when initially trying to gain trust. With the miner hidden, an application could potentially switch pools without it being visible to the user. The user may catch it eventually when they look at their pool stats, but I think leaving this as an option and visible by default is the best way to handle this. Also, miners new to CGWatcher are probably used to looking at cgminer's window to get information quickly... so some may prefer to leave it visible. This is why I added a "Miner View" in CGRemote that displays miner stats in a cgminer-like appearance.


As far as increasing your hashrate...

I don't remember my scrypt speeds for the 7850, I never tried squeezing as many hashes out of it as I could. It is almost always mining bitcoin because desktop interactivity is better, and the computer it's mining on gets used occasionally by someone who isn't me. In fact, this particular miner is the reason I created the big "Pause Mining/Start Mining" button on the Status tab, so they could easily start/stop the miner if they found it was using too much GPU while they were using the computer. I also have a 7870 mining in the same situation at a different house. I'm not the best person to answer questions on tweaking, because my miners are all normal-use desktops so are intentionally turned down. That may sound strange being that I wrote CGWatcher, but it is designed expecting you are configuring the miner yourself rather than doing it for you. Creating a configuration "setup wizard" for beginners has been on the to-do list for a while as well, as well as some other things to help beginners specifically, but I haven't gotten there yet. There are features like Config File Editor that show you all of the available settings and what they mean, and do validation checks to make sure you've entered things in the correct format.

I'd recommend checking:

Litecoin mining hardware comparison (miners post their hashrates and settings) - http://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison

Litecoin forum (if you don't find anything here, you could create a post asking for help with 7850 config and you should get a lot of help)

Consolidated Litecoin Mining Guide for 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx GPUs - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117221.0

Litecoin Mining subreddit - http://reddit.com/r/litecoinmining (also a good place to ask for help)

Alternate Cryptocurrencies section


EDIT: Also update to the latest version of CGMiner. If you find any older version works better, you can always go back.

No problem. It is fixed, I just haven't finished the update yet. There were some issues with the scheduler I've had to work out. I think (hope) I'm about done so it will be available soon.

As crazyates suggested you'd probably have an easier time converting that hashrate to shares and mining X total shares per customer, which can then be divided up onto whatever devices are available. Total shares would have to be accepted + rejected + stale since you're selling by hashrate, not accepted shares. I'm guessing --shares already does this. If you used this method, you can get these values via the miner's API.


You could also keep track of time and hashrate (or total hashes) and keep mining until the customer averaged 333Mh/s over the time frame they purchased. Since you're selling by hashrate, I think this is the most accurate (though the difference may be negligible.)


Or contract it on a per-erupter basis, one erupter per day/week/month (which may have a hashrate around 333Mh/s) will cost Y. Doing it this way you'd have to keep track of the time the erupter was running to account for any downtime caused by miner crashes, etc.

Either way it's possible.

Yes, CGWatcher has profitability mining...

http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/2013/07/profitability-mining-in-cgwatcher.html

There have been some changes since I wrote that, and I'm making more improvements at the moment... but that explains how it works. The code I'm working on at the moment is the code that switches profiles when scheduled, so if you experience any problems let me know and they'll be fixed if they aren't already (I've fixed a lot but haven't released yet, a little more to do).

The scheduler in CGWatcher also has a lot of other options as well.

As for my config, my 7850 miner is down at the moment and Teamviewer crashed so I can't get to it (coincidentally, this is why I created an option to start a program in CGWatcher's scheduler that can be triggered (like any other actions) when a program stops running. So I can set it to start Teamviewer whenever Teamviewer stops running. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get to the miner to get this option setup (it's located about 45 minutes from my home). And CGRemote doesn't yet have the option to get configs remotely, although the code is finished I haven't finished the interface.

With all that said, here is my (2) 7950 config. I use this computer daily so I need to maintain usability, which is why I have a low intensity:



If you want that in arguments (CGWatcher has a Config File Editor that can convert a config file to arguments or vice versa):



This config should get you started, then you can tweak it from there. All you'll need to change is "shaders" (I'm not sure how many a 7850 has but I'm sure it's around the Internet somewhere) and pool url/user/password. And -d 0 if you're disabling GPU 0 I'm guessing? Thread-concurrency is something you can adjust once you get it working properly... 8192 is a safe number.

Edit: this is a scrypt config. I think when you asked my ltc address that stick in my head so I assumed you're mining ltc. Let me know if you want sha256.

The CGRemote beta is limited to donators (at the request of some early donators), so anyone donating $10 or more is added and will get the full version for free once finished. There is more information at http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgremote.html.

And CGWatcher also has profitability mining with a scheduler that gives you complete control over what happens and when, plus a ton of other features.

If you'd like to try CGWatcher, I believe it should be able to do whatever other GUIs do and possibly more (I can't say for certain because I haven't used other GUIs). A companion application called CGRemote is also currently in beta that allows remote control of miners (even those without CGWatcher). If you end up using CGWatcher I can help you with setting it up as I have a 7850 and 7950s. It uses cgminer or bfgminer as the others do, so you get the hashing speed plus a ton of features. You'll have to download cgminer or bfgminer separately, then create a profile in CGWatcher pointing to the miner (and config file or arguments you'd like to use) and it's pretty easy to follow from there.

CGWatcher post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=185553.0

CGWatcher Newbies post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159267

CGWatcher download: http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgwatcher.html

More information on CGRemote: http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgremote.html

I realize what you're saying, I just don't understand where the problem is occurring. Anything inside quotes is treated as a single argument, at least it's supposed to be. Can you try to start the miner (to reproduce this problem), then go to the Tests tab and click 'Create Debug Report', then email the report to my email address in the Readme? I'd like to reproduce your profile and folder structure and see if I can find where this is occurring.

When creating the batch file, it removes any config file in the miner arguments and then adds the config file to the end. This seems like the obvious place this problem is occurring, but when I tried it earlier using your arguments, miner path, and config file path, it worked as expected.

I thought by "variables" you meant CGWatcher variables... so you can disregard that. The setx commands shouldn't be an issue here.

Also, I didn't change the version number for the update to 1.2.8.1, which is why it didn't say an update was available. I figured I'd make sure this was fixed first, and have been adding a lot of CGRemote-related features today so I figured I'd hold off until that was done.

Thanks


EDIT: Nevermind, I found the problem. An update will be available shortly.

Sorry, I had hard-coded the path to try to reproduce a reported bug and forgot to remove it before compiling. It has been fixed, please download 1.2.8.1 again. I apologize for any inconvenience.

What are the variables you're using? I couldn't find anything that jumped out as the reason this would happen, but admittedly this code needed some cleaning up so I did make some changes and tested using the filenames you've listed. I just uploaded this as version 1.2.8.1. Please download and try this version and see if the problem still exists. If it does, let me know what variables you're using and where so I can keep digging.

Thanks


EDIT: I had hard-coded a path while trying to reproduce this bug and forgot to remove it before uploading. It was only online for about 30 minutes at most, so if you updated to 1.2.8.1 within the first ~45 minutes of release please download again. This includes any auto-update that occurred during this time. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Sorry, no immediate plans for a Linux version. If a Linux dev would be willing to attempt porting it to Linux, I'm open to that (though a lot of changes are being made right now, including some complete re-writes to clean up some of the ugliness that resulted from features being added over time.)

CGRemote works with any cgminer or bfgminer, regardless of OS. However CGRemote is also a Windows .NET application. I haven't tried either with WINE, and in the future if there are changes I can make so that it works with WINE I'll try to make them. A Linux version is on the to-do list, but nowhere near the top unfortunately. Significantly higher up is a small listener utility for Linux and OSX will be written to work with CGRemote, so it can handle problems should the miner's API go down or the few times where things can't be done via the API. CGRemote obvioulsy requires a Windows PC but fortunately most people probably have at least one. Even an old laptop would provide one interface for all miners with the features of CGWatcher. It can be used to control miners on the same computer, local network, or over the Internet.

I'm not at home right now so can't look at the code, but this was probably a bug introduced when I added a separate hashrate setting for each algorithm. I think if you set scrypt to 1khs it should be happy without affecting anything (unless you're mining a scrypt coin on your 3dfx voodoo.)

Thanks, I'll make sure this is fixed in 1.2.8.

Yeah you can use decimals for that. When I was originally testing it I had it switching profiles every 3 minutes (0.05 hours). Once you save it it will give you a better description (e.g. "3 min" instead of "0.05 hours")

Coins that are linked to a profile (coins that you mine) are not removed even if they disappear from coinchoose. Their profitability data will just go to zero, as was initially requested and thought to be the best way to handle this (though at the time the assumption was that coins dropping off had no buy orders, not because of block explorers going down). I believe coinchoose has corrected the litecoin issue, at least for now. I just made changes to record the last updated date/time for each coin to at least be able to tell if a coin is not on coinchoose, but what a user would want to do in that case depends on why the coin is gone. I think the safer thing to do is to reset all of its values to zero, because more often than not coins are going to drop because they are dying. I don't expect what happened with litecoin to be a common enough issue to warrant any changing this, and even if it did there is no easy way to automatically tell a) why the coin is gone, and b) if the coin is still most profitable.

Coins that you don't mine are removed if they drop off coinchoose.

I'm not sure what interval you're referring to. By default coin profitability data is updated every 15 minutes. You can change that by changing the CoinRefreshInterval value in CGWatcher.exe.ini. The value is in minutes, no decimals. Minimum value is 5, anything below that will just be reset to 5.

If you schedule CGWatcher to switch profiles to most profitable, for example, it will update the profitability data before switching if it has not been updated within the last 15 minutes. As requested that will change in 1.2.7, where it will always update profitability data right before selecting a profile unless the data was already updated within the past 5 minutes.

Let me know if that's not the interval you were referring to.

The interval for updating profitability data is stored in the CoinRefreshInterval setting in CGWatcher.exe.ini. The value is in minutes, and the minimum is 5 (anything lower will be changed to 5).

What happens now when a scheduled action to switch profiles based on profitability (or related fields) occurs, it checks to see if the data was updated within the last 15 minutes, and if not it updates it before switching profiles to make sure it is using current data to base its profile selection on.

I've changed this so that now when this type of scheduled action occurs, it will always update coin data before selecting a profile unless it had already been updated within the past 5 minutes. This is to reduce unnecessary requests from coinchoose. So this change will be in version 1.2.7. If you think it should be handled differently I'm open to suggestions.


MonsterZero, samfisher: Good to know. It is satisfying as a developer to list everything I've fixed or improved, even though I suspect most users never read changelogs. But I occasionally forget to write down changes if I didn't already have them on the to-do list, so I figured if I got a response from that it would help me remember. 

I don't have an Avalon so I hadn't considered it. There are so many devices coming out that I think keeping the GUI device-independent is best at the moment.

I think CGRemote should work well for this though. It's a Windows application but can monitor and control local and remote miners on any OS. It's currently being tested by a group of users, so I haven't posted here yet. But I'd estimate its release sometime in the next couple weeks.

More info and video demo:

http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgremote.html

Version 1.2.6 has a ton of improvements and bug fixes, and anyone using CGRemote should update to this version with the new CGRemote update (1.0.3). See original post or readme for most of the changes (I stopped writing them down after a while.)

Version 1.2.6 has a ton of improvements and bug fixes, and anyone using CGRemote should update to this version with the new CGRemote update (1.0.3).