Idle settings are fixed, now you can modify which workers will send warnings and what your threshold is before receiving them.

The following features will be added to the PPS Pool tonight:

1) 24 hour earnings + hourly worker speed/earnings graphs.
2) Idle Miner notifications



UPDATE:  Idle miners and 24 hour earning stat are now enabled.  Worker speed graphs will be delayed while I rewrite how I'm handling the log of worker data to make it able to easily hold and pull up a detailed hourly history of each worker.

1)  I'm trying to figure out a good way to calculate 24H rewards on PPS Guild right now.  BTC Guild does it by taking the sum of your rewards on blocks in the last 24 hours, which is simple.  PPS Guild doesn't have that type of reference point [it doesn't bother tracking shares per user per block].

I'll probably just make an hourly log of each user's share count and graph it out for you, which could also be easily referenced for a count of the previous 24 hours.


2)  I will be updating the My Account page to use the same variable time [5 / 15 / 30 / 60] minute for average speed calculations, which will keep them in sync.



UPDATE:

1) The logger has been implemented, and this time tomorrow you will be able to view your past 24 hour earnings (updated hourly).  I will also work on getting some pretty graphs to accompany the data.

2) The My Account page now calculates worker speeds based on the time range at the top.  Unfortunately this means if you've been mining for 1+ hours on some workers, your new workers will take 1 hour before their average speed is accurate.  However, you'll end up with consistent reporting across the page.

No, its related to the Google Ads that show up for people who don't donate.  The AdSense scripts are served over regular HTTP, not HTTPS since they don't have SSL support for AdSense.

Over the long run, proportional should pay you more.  It's the nature of the mining, given a long enough time frame it will level out to near-0% luck.

However, pool hopping has no measurable affect on your rewards.  There are no successful hoppers on BTC Guild that I've been able to find.  I've watched a few accounts that I suspected were hopping [speed fluctuations], and they're stab in the dark attempts.  They're hopping to us after long polls, but it has nothing to do with whether we found the block or not.  My suspicion is they're checking pools that claim blocks in real-time, and if it fails, they make a guess of BTC Guild/Deepbit.

Since they're just erratically hopping and not even close to accurate, their influence on non-hoppers rewards is minimal if any.

Moved bitcoind to a different server for the PPS pool, giving it [almost] free reign of the RAM on the server.  Idle Miners should be in tonight for PPS Guild, but may be delayed due to working on PoolServerJ updates with shadders.

EDIT:  Just for clarification, this change caused disconnects for about 2 minutes, sorry for the downtime but it was needed to improve performance.

Posting problems for the PPS server in both threads is fine at the moment, as long as people don't ask about proportional in the PPS Beta thread .

My response to the PPS outage:
The server crashed while I was asleep, the server ran out of memory and I had the swapfile turned off previously when it was the SC Guild secondary server.  This is why I have the disclaimer at the top saying make sure you've got a failover server!

Back up and running today.  When I get off work this afternoon I will be moving bitcoind off the PoolServerJ server so it can have more RAM available.  I've also added a script that polls the PoolServerJ stats once per minute.  That poll forces a garbage collection, so it should help with the RAM issues.  Right now the PPS Beta is running on a repurposed server, and its setup as an "all-in-one" (MySQL, Apache, Bitcoind, and PoolServerJ all run on the same server).

Crashed while I was asleep, the server ran out of memory and I had the swapfile turned off previously when it was the SC Guild secondary server.  This is why I have the disclaimer at the top saying make sure you've got a failover server!

Back up and running today.  When I get off work this afternoon I will be moving bitcoind off the PoolServerJ server so it can have more RAM available.  I've also added a script that polls the PoolServerJ stats once per minute.  That page forces a garbage collection, so it should help with the RAM issues.

Been watching this evolve as Nachtwind's little project.  Alpha should be interesting, hopefully in beta we'll have a cleaned up UI.  My personal game to compare this to (once its in full swing) is the old Trade Wars/Drug Wars BBS games .

Added a Hall of Fame for Fastest Users (Last Hour), Most Shares, and Most Blocks Found.


Updated the top bar to modify how it calculates your average speed.  If you submitted shares between 61 and 70 minutes ago, it will use a 60 minute average.  31-40 minutes ago, 30 minute average.  16-25 minutes ago, 15 minute average.  Otherwise a 5 minute.  Gives you a faster update of your miner speed through the website, and slowly uses a longer time frame for analysis to give you a reliable speed readout.


By the time your miner hits the 60 minute average, your estimated speed should be very stable, outside of minor variance due to individual luck.  Faster miners (300 MH/s+) should be seeing estimated speed be within about 5% (+ or -), and very fast miners (1 GH/s) will likely see a much smaller discrepancy between estimated and actual speeds.


Idle Miner warnings will be added this evening, as well as standard APIs from BTC Guild.

3 blocks have been found by BTC Guild using PoolServerJ so far.  All 3 had the latest patch where it logs shares detected as matching current difficulty before submission and tracks them.

All 3 blocks were identified by PSJ as full difficulty shares before submission, and all 3 were accepted.  No false positives/false negatives so far.

The idle email issue should be resolved as of about an hour ago.  As you mentioned, it was an error in the way in time zone handling.

I'm planning on making some revisions to the website this week, mostly in an attempt to begin integrating the PPS pool with the primary website so that you share accounts/workers across the two payout methods.  Once the merge happens, you will still need to use pps.btcguild.com to connect to it, since its using different pool software at the moment.  Eventually updates to the pool software will be deployed and flag individual workers with PPS/Proportional flags so you can switch on the fly without changing your miner configurations.


While making the revisions, I will be trying to make everything more modular for easier editing, and part of that will include "Deleting" workers [permanently hide].  A lot of BTC Guild was designed in the fastest way that would make it work, rather than efficiency, since it was being built while the pool speed doubled every few days.


As a side note, the main pool will start integrating a few PoolServerJ nodes soon.  There was a brief test last night where approximately 10% of the pool was shifted to PSJ.  Performance was reasonable, though the load was a bit too much for our pushpool VPS nodes to handle.  However, I believe putting it onto a dedicated quad-core server with ample RAM, PSJ will be able to blow pushpool away.  The new server has been provisioned, I'm just waiting for a small long poll bug to be resolved before it gets deployed.

Giving PSJ a bit of a bump here.

BTC Guild's new PPS pool has elected to use PoolServerJ during its beta run.  So far the performance has been outstanding (looking at stale/reject rates of < 0.2%).  It eats a decent chunk of RAM at boot, but the increase in RAM usage is very small as the pool scales.

Excellent work shadders, and hopefully soon we can post that a PSJ pool has found its first block .

BTC Guild - Pay Per Share

BTC Guild has opened up a beta pool for true pay-per-share.  This is not SMPPS/PPLNS where rewards are capped at what the pool has earned to date, or where you have to wait for a block to solve to get your payouts.  Every share you submit instantly credits your account with rewards, and they can be withdrawn as soon as you have earned the minimum payout of 0.10.

The new pool server is running on PoolServerJ.  Since this pool software hasn't been tested as thoroughly as pushpool, BTC Guild's PPS pool is considered beta.  Share submissions and rewards are secure, but if the pool crashes it may not automatically recover like our pushpool servers do.  As such, it is recommended you use a miner with the ability to failover to another server when using BTC Guild (PPS Beta).

Our initial testing has been showing significantly faster response times to getwork requests, thanks to PoolServerJ's caching of work in advance, eliminating the relay time where pushpool sends a getwork request and relays theresponse to your miner.  Invalid share rates are exceptionally low, and the My Account worker summary gives you a breakdown of the exact reason a share is rejected.

We've been getting "attacked" technically for the past day.  The servers are more resilient than before due to load balancing, but it has caused some connection/idle issues.  The accounts are being automatically banned as they crop up, it hasn't been too hard to spot the malicious users, but it isn't possible to filter them until after they've caused some performance issues.

Things have been improving steadily for the last few hours.


Additionally, we've opened up a Pay-per-Share version of BTC Guild, accessible at http://pps.btcguild.com .  This is REAL Pay-per-Share, not SMPPS/PPLNS, meaning there is no concept of backpay/limits on your rewards.  You get 'X' per share (based on difficulty, with a fee of 7% compared to Deepbit's 10% PPS), and it is available for withdrawal immediately without any type of confirmation timer [0.10 minimum payout].

The new pool server is running on PoolServerJ.  Since this pool software hasn't been tested as thoroughly as pushpool, BTC Guild's PPS pool is considered beta.  Share submissions and rewards are secure, but if the pool crashes it may not automatically recover like our pushpool servers do.  As such, it is recommended you use a miner with the ability to failover to another server when using BTC Guild (PPS Beta).

Some new servers added to the round robin, dedicated for load balancing rather than LB+Pushpoold on the same server.  Should prevent the problems we were having yesterday.


UPDATE:  Doing a full reboot of all the servers.  Trying to make the change live seems to have caused very uneven loads.

All of the servers are online and running smooth again.  You said they failed over to ArsBitcoin an hour ago, which is when the servers were going up/down due to the large network that was basically DDoS'ing our servers systematically as they failed over from one server to another.

I'm hoping by tomorrow morning the dedicated load balancers are up and running, at which point I'll also be turning on the autoban/filter for the pools to prevent the issues we had this evening.

Just banned a large IP range, looks like someone with access to a couple thousand computers tried to point them at the guild, and they weren't using the round robin DNS.  So they'd point at one IP, overload it to the point of failure, then move to another as they failed.


Word of advice if you're going to steal electricity from your university/corporation:  Learn how to use miners properly.  I don't care how many machines you're leeching, you don't need to issue 20,000 getworks/second.

I've identified the problem people are having connecting.  The first two servers in the round robin list are receiving far greater load than the other 8.  If you're having issues with your connection try changing to any of the following IPs directly:

78.46.186.29
78.46.186.30
78.46.186.50
78.46.186.51
78.46.186.52
78.46.186.53
78.46.186.54


I'm provisioning a pair of two small servers to put at the top of the round robin list to alleviate the problem.  Hopefully they will be online in just a few hours.