OK I was hoping that was the case.

All I see is the occasional aberration where there is a sharp fall and rise. This is probably only a few data points (minutes) due to the way the network diff adjusts itself or some other insignificant anomaly.

I do not see any sharp rises, in fact if you keep an eye on the diff axis as you continuously zoom out you can see that diff is now rising slower within the last 24 hours than it has been during the last days.

Yeah, but I assume its only for checking the occasional misbehaving rig. I suspect most miners with this quantity of hardware would be using VNC or Team Viewer or similar to monitor and control remotely.

I am not sure what you are on about, your chart indicates that over roughly the last 7 days difficulty has risen by ~0.03 difficulty. This agrees with what I have been seeing on my miners this last week with getmininginfo.

I have mined on a variety of AMD and Intel CPU now and in conclusion the way to 'tune' your CPU is to buy a faster one. The only way you could have 'detuned' your CPU is if you installed a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU or if its reducing its own clocks because it is detecting that its temperatures have reached a thermal protection threshold. I have a laptop that will do this (i5) and it will never go its highest multiplier. It just adjusts itself to be around 80 deg C. The maximum Tcase temperature according to intel is 105 deg C though.

The fins are far too large, you need to go for surface area instead of mass.

My client has developed a bug on one of my machines where for over 24 hours it just sat on one block using 100% CPU meanwhile the blockchain is actually more than 1000 blocks ahead.

The client has 8 active connections and so it seems it is not a connectivity issue.

EDIT: 29 hours it seems, based on how much the restarted client must catch up. That agrees with the end of the debug log where it stops reporting mining stats at a few minutes after midnight when I was asleep:

I think we should wait until a GPU miner is actually released before we start guesstimating difficulties and those scenarios. I think a lot of people here are very desperate to 'strike it rich' on a new GPU miner release for this coin. It really shows in some of the other threads, to the point where it is cringe worthy.

Maybe it's just my line of work, but I don't believe in things until I see some evidence.

We have seen no evidence for a GPU miner, other than a few words typed on a webpage on the internet.

If mtrlt did not have a reputation from his creation of previous miners, then most people would too be as skeptical as I am.

Even if a GPU miner is released tomorrow, keep in mind that the 'difference' between CPU and GPU mining will not be as extreme as it was for bitcoin and the SHA-256 coins when its GPU miners were released. Bitcoin miners experienced a ~100 fold improvement on GPU if you were to compare them when investing an equal amount on the hardware (CPU vs GPU). A primecoin GPU miner will be far less of a improvement than this, some have speculated as low as only a handful of times more efficient than CPU alone.

The GPU miner's performance will depend to a good extent on the CPU itself. Whereas with current GPU mining it depends almost entirely on only the GPU itself. If you think your 5x 7950 scrypt rig with celeron CPU is going to tear up primecoin, well, maybe you are in for a shock. We'll have to wait and see.

I don't want to sound like a tinfoil-hatter, but there is also a chance this is an extremely elaborate scam. There has been almost $10,000 USD in donations sent to that bitcoin address now. It would not be the first time that a shocking scam has gone down on these forums and a lot of people lost BTC because of it. Also keep in mind that the buying/selling/exchange of accounts on this forum is permitted.

Assuming the above was false, I don't mean to diminish mtrlt's efforts and I wish him the best of luck with the development. That being said I think GPU mining on primecoin is unlikely to be the glorious horizon that so many seem to think it will be.

No, because the diff is ~9.75 now. The chainsperday refers only to the integer (9) difficulty not the fractional part (0.75)

So actually your chance of finding a block is closer to 0.3 per day, assuming no variance.

Couldn't you say exactly the same about bitcoin a few years ago?

Well either your hardware is not so great or you are unlucky or both. Consider pool mining if you are so desperate for some return.

Here's one of my miner boxes:

https://i.imgur.com/CjL22NC.jpg

From what I understand Mikaelh and others have done extensive testing to determine the optimum values for all of those variables. Unless you have an extremely good understanding of what you are tweaking and how that alters the mining process then it is best to use the defaults, as you could easily misinterpret what is happening and actually reduce your mining performance. (As a matter of fact, please do that so I can mine more easily  )

You can install both and then compare them. With mikaelh's HP9, make a shortcut to the .exe and append '-gen' to the end of the target field. Then let it download the blockchain and let it start mining for a few minutes. Use 'getmininginfo' in the console and see what your CPU gives you. Currently we are taking 'primesperday' statistic as the most accurate estimate of performance.

You can then also pool mine for a while. Maybe a few days running each to reduce variance (your 'luck'). And compare your results.

If you are only going to mine on 1 or 2 CPU's and/or they are slow, pool mining might be better because it may otherwise take days to find a block mining solo. On the other hand some miners have many CPU's and usually find at least one block per day.

If you tell me what CPU's you have (model number: right click properties on Computer in most versions of windows, or, use CPU-Z) I could estimate your machines performance roughly.

Well if you are using a stress testing app on a GPU that supports error detection, its rare to see any model Radeon card NOT throw errors at temps approaching 95 deg C.

While sitting in your chair running VPS remotely is nice, I preferred to take an alternate route.

I originally got a bunch (read: 12) old HP servers with 64-bit CPU's at an IT auction. Turned out they were far too inefficient (about 350 watts for <0.2 chainsperday). Ended up selling most of these and making a nice profit anyway.

A much better option is 2nd hand desktop PC's, core2duo CPU are the minimum I settle for now. These kind of machines can be had for more or less free if you find companies trying to get rid of their end of life systems and avoid disposal costs. Even at auctions I see systems like these go for <$20 every week.

I am running four on a wattmeter right now, about 300 watts total which is about $60/month in electricity for 1.2 chainsperday. It's not as great as some VPS by numbers alone, but at the end of the day I have accumulated a bunch of computer systems and parts that are still can still be sold as tested parts on eBay. I already operate a store on eBay so this is in my interests anyway.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out, and good on ya for releasing the design info on github.

Check the computers BIOS and OS clocks are correct. Some OS refer to the BIOS and others refer to other time sources, it depends. It must be accurate for most crypto clients to work correctly.

Also, downloading and indexing the blockchain is intensive on CPU, memory, and especially disk IO. If there is a hardware instability problem or a driver issue with the chipset, you might find it 'just stops working', crashes, or BSODs. I realize if you are running on VPS this may be difficult to test.

Probably a firewall permission problem or misconfiguration. I note that on some windows installations it does not warn or prompt you that it has blocked primecoin exe and you must manually go and resolve the issue.

Because I operate several hosts that run primecoin, I find that this command works well when a new host has fresh primecoin install and needs to begin connecting to peers and sync:


Then within a few seconds it can make its first node connection and then through that find more nodes.

This doesn't work on my ATI 5xxx and 6xxx cards. I have to use multiple instances

Yeah the pressure was immense. Thinking of it from the point of view of molecules of air, its not surprising that the pressure is high. Its statistically unlikely for many to find their way past 14 sets of high velocity fan blades in a row.

Nine character non-caps patterns arn't so hard to find. Now try and find a 13+ character "1" pattern short address.