Hey roy7,

So, I decided to check your stats page again.  Now you've found 11 shares (3 more since this morning when I first checked).  I've found exactly 0 more.

Am I just exceedingly unlucky, or have you been exceedingly lucky, or is something more nefarious going on here on my end?  Over 16 hours since the restart after upgrading Bitcoin-Qt to 0.9.1 and I've found 1 share...

Edit: Alright, that's just weird... when I refreshed the stats on your side it now says you've found 10 shares (? orphan, ? dead).  Ummm... I KNOW it showed 11 just a minute ago... lol

Interesting idea.  I hadn't thought to force connections to known large nodes.  I assume you can either a) pass multiple nodes or b) provide multiple -n parameters in the startup?

a) ./run_p2pool.py -n host1:port host2:port
b) ./run_p2pool.py -n host1:port -n host2:port

I'll give that a try to see if it helps propagate my shares more quickly.

Again, thanks for the help

Side note... 14 hours of uptime on the node, 2 shares found (1 orphan)... arghh... lol.  Come on Lady Luck, shine down on the p2pool hashers!

Looking at your stats...

1) I like the front end by John Doe.  Very clean!
2) You don't have a single orphaned/dead share.  I wish I were so lucky.  After restarting my local node last night from upgrading to 0.9.1 I have found 2 shares, 1 of them is an orphan.  Over the past few days I've noticed my orphan rate has gone way up... from getting maybe 1 orphaned share in the first 15 shares I found, to getting a streak of about 8 orphaned shares in a row.

I know there have been tons of write-ups done on how to tune your local node, and I've read through them.  Unfortunately I'm just consistently getting a ton of orphans.  I'll keep trying to tune things to see if I can reduce the orphan rate.  Perhaps you could offer up some further suggestions?  Here's my setup:

Bitcoin-Qt and p2pool latest versions are running on a quad-core i7 (4850HQ @ 2.3GHz) with 16G RAM and a 512G PCI-e SSD.  It is on a wired gigabit internal network connected to the outside world at 35Mbps down 10Mbps up.  There is virtually no other traffic on this network (an iPhone and an iPad).  I have opened up ports 9332, 9333, 8333.  I have also tried a few of the different settings in bitcoin.conf (changing block size up and down, setting max connections from values of 6 to 50, etc).  I'm hashing away with an Antminer S1 over clocked to 200GH/s @ 393MHz with ~0.1% HW.  The S1 is on the latest firmware.  Yes, it's wired into the network (not wireless).

The biggest culprit I see is over the past week the reported Bitcoind GetBlock Template Latency has a mean of 0.572s (572ms seems way too high).  Over the past day, the mean is 372ms, which I feel is still ridiculously high.  Am I correct in my assumption here that this latency is likely what is causing me the pain?

Also, to give you an example of how things look, since I restarted everything last night after the upgrade, (11+ hours ago) I've found 2 shares, 1 of which is an orphan - effectively then 1 share added to the share chain.  I can certainly accept that it is taking me longer than the "expected" time to find shares.  Unfortunately, when I finally *do* find that share and it is then orphaned, it really has a negative impact.

smooth and roy7, thanks for taking the time and providing the explanation.  Just to make sure I've got everything correct, ultimately it works out to be:

Shares are counted in a rolling 3 day window.  Every block found during that time is paid out based upon how many valid shares a miner has contributed during that 3 day window.

So, to use a concrete example, I'm running an Antminer S1 @ 200GH/s on a local p2pool node.  I've had it setup and running for a week at this point.  I'll have to shut it down for a bit tonight to upgrade to 0.9.1, but that will take like 5 minutes tops.  During this week, p2pool has found 3 blocks, and I received payouts for each.  Now it's been nearly 4 days since a block was found.  When that block is found, assuming I continue on without interruption and I find about 6 shares a day, I'll get 18 shares worth of payment from that block, and from every block found until my rate of found shares goes down.

Again, thanks for taking the time and providing the explanation!

Since you all are discussing blocks and how long it is taking to find them, perhaps I could get a little help on the payouts.  I understand p2pool has a higher variance than traditional pools.  I understand the ddos-resistant nature of the setup.  I believe in it - enough to have setup and run my own p2pool node on a Mac, and post a tutorial on how to do so in another forum.

Having written that, I'm wondering how the payouts are affected by long droughts between block finds, and hope someone can clarify things for me.  Let's take a couple of examples and walk through them.  For the sake of the discussion, we will assume that there is a constant 200GH/s miner, a difficulty that does not increase and an expected payout of 0.01BTC per day in all of the examples.

Example 1: Miner finds a valid share every 4 hours.  Pool finds a block every 24 hours.
This is the average example, so I would expect payout to be right on that 0.01BTC per day.  Is my understanding correct?

Example 2: Miner finds a valid share every 4 hours.  Pool finds a block every 96 hours.
In this example, the miner is still working and finding shares; however the pool has hit a string of bad luck and doesn't find a block for 4 days.  Does the miner get rewarded for having submitted shares successfully during the entire 96 hours, or will only a given window of those shares be counted?  In other words, when the pool finds the block, does the miner get paid for 4 days of work, or 1?  My understanding is that this is a bad luck case, and the miner would only get the expected 0.01BTC once the pool finds the block.  Is my understanding correct?

Example 3: Miner finds 4 invalid shares (orphans) per day.  Pool finds a block every 24 hours.
Here the miner's shares are beat getting into the share chain - at least that is what I assume orphaned means, if my understanding is wrong, then please define orphaned and dead shares as they relate to p2pool.  My understanding here is that the miner would not be paid out anything because all of the shares submitted are invalid.  Is this correct?

Example 4: Miner finds 4 valid shares a day for 3 days, but finds all invalid shares on the 4th day.  Pool finds block on the 5th day.
So, the miner has been chugging along for 4 days, happily submitting shares.  Unfortunately on the 4th day all of the submitted shares were invalid.  If things follow the pattern I've laid out in previous examples, then the miner doesn't get paid for his efforts because the only shares seen in the past 24 hours are invalid ones.  Is my understanding correct?

Example 5: Miner finds 8 valid shares in a day.  Pool finds 2 blocks a day.
Since the examples have been all doom and gloom up to this point, let's look at the other side of the coin - where lady luck shines on us a bit.  Here the miner is finding and submitting twice the expected amount of work and the pool is finding double the number of blocks.  In this case, I expect that the miner would be making 4 times the expected payout.  Twice as much because he's finding double the shares and twice as much again because the pool is finding 2 blocks in that 24 hour window.  Is this correct?

Thanks in advance to everyone for helping!

Hey reactor... any updates on whether or not this is going to proceed?  I've been unable to get any word back from Bitmain other than what I reported here in this thread a few days ago.  Their website remains as it was yesterday - everything is sold out and no news on future availability or what products are in the pipeline.

I haven't heard anything back from them either after their reply that the U2 is sold out.  Looking at their site now, EVERYTHING is listed as sold out... there goes my plan on picking up another S1

That $250 savings is exactly the reason I'm looking into it.  The S1 is pretty efficient, drawing less than 400 watts running at 200GH/s.  My interest here in the U2 was just to see how they'd perform compared to the S1.  The hardware would cost a bunch more at the outset to get 100 U2s (3BTC give or take) vs the <1BTC paid for the S1; however, the U2 farm would consume about half the power of the S1.  Would I make up the difference?  Eventually.  Like the gridseed, the U2 is pretty much a "fun" piece of hardware.  I'll probably end up giving them out to coworkers/friends as gifts to get them into BTC, once I've had my fun playing with them

Exactly the reseller I've been looking at.  They've got the best price I've seen (at least among legitimate ones).  Also you gave them a pretty good review in an earlier post, so they'll likely get my business.  As I wrote, this would be more an experiment than anything else.  I don't currently have any kind of scrypt hashing power (my rMBP will only put out about 125k when using both the GPU and CPU).  Getting about triple the rate while also a) not potentially turning my laptop into a very expensive paperweight and b) consuming less than 10 watts at the wall for it?  Yes please.

Not a problem.  Hopefully they'll get back to you and say, "Oh yes, we've been expecting your order!"

If this doesn't happen, I'll probably pick up one or two of those gridseed miners to play with.  I've got an RPi, a few USB hubs and a power supply hanging around that could be put to use mining scrypt.

Reactor,

I contacted Bitmain by email yesterday regarding placing an order for U2.  The following is the response from them:

Hi,
U2 is out of stock now, please follow our website store for open sales news.

Best Regards

BITMAIN

This e-mail and its attachments contain confidential information from BITMAIN TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED, which is intended only for the person or entity whose address is listed above. Any use of the information contained herein in any way (including, but not limited to, total or partial disclosure, reproduction, or dissemination) by persons other than the intended recipient(s) is prohibited. If you receive this e-mail in error, please notify the sender by phone or email immediately and delete it! Thank you.

Hopefully because you previously contacted them about placing an order they might have set some inventory aside for you, but I don't hold out much hope.

You don't want to connect your miner directly to your computer.  The only time you will do that is when you are initially setting it up - and even then this isn't necessary.

Assuming your local network is 192.168.1.*, all you have to do is plug your miner into your router.  You can then connect to it wirelessly from your computer to do the setup.  If your network is not 192.168.1.*, then you've got a couple choices.  First, you can try plugging the miner directly into your computer via network cable.  Assuming you can see it, you can configure it.  If you can't see it, you can either change the IP configuration of your computer, or log into your router and change your IP configuration there to use the 192.168.1.*.

Hope this helps.

Hey reactor,

I just joined because I saw your group buy and figured I'd get in while the getting's good .  I had a few direct orders from China get cancelled by the seller, so I'm hopeful that we might actually get something going here.  Please put me down for 5.

Thanks!