Yeah, during the final hour of the block (I was asleep for most of it), the only thought going through my mind was:  "Please don't have us set the new record for most shares in a single block."

8 minutes between long polls is absolutely normal.  You were idle for under 2 minutes.

The second set of disconnects/reconnects in your log were me restarting the load balancers, I added an extra server to the list [the old 2nd server for SC Guild].  You'll notice the first disconnect is less than 30 seconds before the last reconnect. 

I also banned 17 IPs last night that were showing very high getwork requests and low/non-existent share submissions, which should help as well.  I'm still manually performing these bans until I'm confident my script wont ban legit users that have clients keeping a connection open with the pool for failover/load balancing in cgminer/poclbm.

I see ~90 seconds of idles in your log.  Whether or not that was on my side or yours I can't say, it was a very short time frame.  There was a 4 minute window in the middle of the day with idles today due to an ISP routing issue that affected about half of the servers including the website.

However, idles have _NOTHING_ to do with luck.  Luck is determined by shares in a round, which idles have absolutely no affect on.

Had 3-4 minutes of downtime, routing issues at the host.  By the time I was notified of the issue and had a chance to look it was already recovering.

Are you giving it a full 15-20 minutes before comparing?  Pools estimate your speed by shares submitted .  It will never be perfectly accurate, but it should be within 10-20% +/- at any time [after the first 15 minutes], and when you look at the performance charts on a day where you were mining the full 24 hours, your speed should be very close to what your miner reports.

+1.  I made the same decision (posted it in the SC Guild thread when asked to port over other BTC Guild features).

A few tweaks may be a move in the right direction, but its NOT justification to fork a technology that only has a small niche audience.  The entire concept of digital / cryptocurrency needs time to mature before it breaks down into competing forks.  What we need is an effective version of merchant processors like what people are already used to with their credit cards or PayPal.  Online retailers are rarely programmers.  Most of them don't even know basic HTML, you can't expect them to integrate Bitcoins into their XYZ software with their own form of confirmation/address tracking.

Unfortunately, pulling that off is a lot harder than changing variables and implementing minor modifications to releasing ForkCoin.

I can't speak for doublec, but I haven't made much contact with RealSolid in the past.  My impression was he hated me and BTC Guild ever since I made the original BTC Guild fork for I0Coins.  I gave SC support at first, thinking we may have had a sub-BTC type fork for small transactions with fast confirms.  At first I didn't think much about how the ArtForz issue was handled, but the logs of the chat between RealSolid and gavinanderson put me over the edge.

You don't base something off the work of others, then start going off about how bad their work was, how much better yours is, then refuse to help them when you find an issue.  If you're so damn good, make your own BTC-clone currency from scratch [without looking at the BTC code while you do it].

Actually, I sold the majority of my coins back when they were actually worth something (~0.02).  But I don't deny that I sold the rest of my coins after posting my announcement.  Not that it mattered, the price tanked when doublec closed bitparking, not as a result of me cashing out.

I don't run any exchange, just a pool.

I know for I0C we could've easily executed a double spend.  I'm not sure what actual protections were put into SC that may or may not prevent a doublespend.  I know looking at moonco.in they only need 1 confirm for your coins, so we could probably have done it before I posted the shutdown notice.  But I'm not going to rip off the people that spent time like I did to setup services to work with forkcoins.  I think we're under 50% (or really close to it now), so at this point it doesn't seem possible.

However, if SC continues to decline, I would definitely be wary of accepting SC when there are single miners out there with enough power to attempt doublespends.  There are more than a few out there with 30-50 GH/s of their own.

We're actually on block 29333.  The block explorer for SC is broken due to the new releases of solidcoind.

If I do a mass payout, most people will never see their coins either way.  Most accounts have no wallet at all.  Most of the ones that do use SC Exchange (Bitparking) wallets, which are no longer being supported by doublec.

Good job Gavin on how you handled this.  Nice to see at least one side of the conversation remained diplomatic and respectful.

Confirmations fixed.  SC Guild will be shutting off in 1 week.  I planned on keeping this running, since the new server setup was much cheaper to maintain, but after the last few days, I'm withdrawing all support for RealSolid/CoinHunter and SolidCoins.

BurningToad:  If you need some help with load balancing options, hit me up in the #btcguild IRC chat.

Fixed the last share time problem.

Server move was completed early (~8:35 PM, PDT).  So far everything seems to be running smooth.  If you see anything weird (most likely things related to time due to the time zone change), please report it to webmaster@btcguild.com

BookLover: Connection issues on your end, using your miner for something other than mining if it isn't a dedicated rig, and as kano said, luck, can affect individual rewards.  You'll notice on the 'My Account' page I give you your 15 minute average speed based on your share submission (the only way a pool can determine your speed).  This can easily vary 10%, and sometimes as much as 25%, +/- from what your miner's actual speed is, due to the randomness of share production.  A 24 hour time frame -should- normally average out very close to your actual speed, so rewards generally don't vary more than a small percentage.  Based on your numbers, it was only ~6% difference between the two days.  If one day you were +3%, the other day -3%, there is your difference.

UPDATE:  Another potential reason are the short rounds, under 10 minutes.  Even more volatile are the ones that are under 1 minute, where your rewards can be anywhere from 0 to 3x your normal production due to your luck of finding shares in the short time frame.

Yes, there was a brief idle for about 4 minutes just now.  I'm preparing to relocate the website to the new cluster instead of being hosted at the old US West server.  The move will happen tomorrow at noon (PDT), I'm just getting some parts moved over in advance to speed up the transition.  I was not expecting the pools to lag as much as they did, so I am sorry that I was not able to give warnings about the short downtime.


When the server move happens tomorrow, stats and payouts will not be available for approximately one hour.  The pools will still be online, running, and recording shares, but the website will not be calculating rounds until the move is complete.  Again, this won't happen until TOMORROW.  Everything will be functioning normally throughout the day, and I don't expect any more idle/pool server downtime as part of the transition.


UPDATE:  One more burst of idles.  I didn't catch the load balancers marking the internal servers offline due to the previous downtime, it was causing cascading failure between the nodes randomly.  Quickly restarting the servers and load balancers, shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

It's a problem in solidcoind, not pushpool, the database, or the servers.  I've used two different pre-compiled binaries from the website, and also compiling it straight from the source.  The only thing left I can think of is seeing how easily I can implement JoelKatz's patches into solidcoind.