Luck statistics were added to the block statistics page, for both a 24H window and since the difficulty change.

As of last night the index page of btcguild.com (no www) does a redirect to www.

As the warning says, check the hardware.  This is NORMALLY due to overclocking and/or changing the voltage on your cards.  However, it is possible you simply have a bad card.  This type of error is something you'd see if you were gaming and suddenly you some textures started to shoot out into space instead of sticking to the geometry.  The card made a mistake, and thats a sign of hardware failure (possibly minor, possibly major).

Just to help anybody out there who is struggling with pushpool scaling like BTC Guild has:

The major bottleneck that you'll run into assuming your hardware is good is going to be the communications between bitcoind and pushpoold.  Every getwork and sendresult request is opening a new local socket for the communication, eventually running the server out of open sockets due to a huge number of TIME_WAITs.  Around 300-400 GH/sec, depending on the server TCP settings, you will hit a point where there are no ports available to open a new local socket.

Changing your servers tcp settings in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ to the following can help, but its only a bandaid fix, you'll still run into issues:
  tcp_fin_timeout   - Changing this to a much lower value, such as 5.
  ip_local_port_range  -  Changing this to a setting such as 10000 65000

My C/C++ skills for networking are pretty rusty, so I haven't yet been able to come up with a fix to get pushpoold/bitcoind to reuse sockets rather than open new ones yet.

BTC Guild currently keeps tx fees, and will likely do so until the total of donations + fees are more than 2% per block.   My current plan is to eventually set it up so any txfees which push the income per block over 2% will be split with the pool.  Until then (and even after that point), I disclose exactly how much BTC the pool has generated in TX Fees on our block statistics page.

Fixed a bug with updating stats from US Central on the My Account page.  No data was lost, it just wasn't updating the worker's share counts when displaying the worker summary/estimated reward.

BTC Guild feeds on your hatred.  If you hate us, I don't feel so bad taking out my rage and anger on you.  It's win win.

Difficulty 2 has been pushed back for now.  That was supposed to fix the MySQL CPU usage wall we were hitting, but we found an index that was missing from the servers when the pool was updated for the master/slave setup.  It cut CPU usage down to a quarter of its original use, so difficulty 2 is not being implemented at this time.

Fixed.  US Central shares were not sync'ing up properly when resetting shares.

This update has been pushed back far too long given how easy it is, but I finally have some time to breathe again and get to work on features .

My Account -> Rewards Summary now display how much BTC you've generated in the last 24 hours.

The server load is not changing quickly.  It would require a swing of over 250 GH/sec to take a server from Low to Overloaded.  Last night, US East and NL were overloaded, because the generic 'btcguild.com' was pointing at both of them using round robin DNS.  Immediately after US Central came online, btcguild.com was changed to point to that server.

Since then, the only server to have a status of overloaded was US Central.  There is a 100 GH/sec window for each status, so it would take a huge migration of workers to move the server from Normal -> Overloaded without spending time in the 'High load' status.

Posting this in a separate thread since the main thread can push important updates out of the way, and the first post isn't always checked for changes.

BTC Guild has recently added a 5th server, and updated all servers to significantly increase their capacity before miner idles become an issue.  It is highly recommended that you now manually pick a server from the list.  Picking a server with too much load will negatively impact your rewards, and it is always preferable to take a low/normal load server over a high/overloaded server, regardless of latency (unless you have actual connection problems to the server).


Please point your miners at one of the following servers (load percentages as of 8:04 AM PDT, June 16th):
  nl.btcguild.com   - 36% load (LOW)
  uk.btcguild.com   - 40% load (LOW)
  useast.btcguild.com   - 45% load (LOW)
  uswest.btcguild.com   - 61% load (Normal)


To view the most current load statistics, you can look at http://www.btcguild.com/pick_a_server.php.  Using the BTC Guild selection in GUI Miner, or using the old "btcguild.com" generic address will point you to the US Central server.  This server is currently overloaded, and it is recommended that all users point to a different one.  For GUI Miner, this is done by selecting 'Other' as the pool, and typing in the address.  For all other miners, it's as simple as changing btcguild.com to one of the servers listed above.

Round robin at the DNS level does not work.  Miner clients are dumb and re-query the DNS every connection, rather than resolve the host at the start.  This causes them to bounce between servers randomly when the DNS round robin was enabled, causing work to be sent everywhere and get rejected.  To date, we've tried:
  DNS Round Robin - Tossed a miner between servers randomly, causing rejects.
  HAProxy Load Balancing - Can't handle that many connections being proxied to remote servers.
  Custom DNS Server program - DNS queries are peer-to-peer, so "sticking" a client ended up sticking a chain of DNS servers.  OpenDNS and Google DNS are distributed, so a miner was sometimes being shot to different servers based on where their DNS query was routed at the time.

The final solution, which is what most people would use is to consolidate the servers to a single data center, put a HAProxy/Pen/Pound server in front of the nodes, and have it do local load balancing.  However, this means that if you have connection problems to one server, you have them with every server.

US West and web server are having a small bit of downtime right now to bring up a US Central server.  US West still seems to hang for a few minutes when its bombarded by all of the new getwork requests after a brief downtime.

Difficulty 2 patch has been delayed for now.  The goal was to get the load off the servers from pushpool receiving shares and posting them to MySQL.  Last night a fix was made to the users mysql table that dramatically dropped the CPU usage of the process.  The problem in scaling has now been narrowed down to the pushpool<->bitcoind communications.  Working on patching this ASAP before moving on to a difficulty adjustment.

Main post and the website's "How to Connect" page have been modified to direct miners to point towards a particular pool rather than the generic "btcguild.com" .  This has been accompanied by a Server Status widget on the side, giving a simple description of the load per server.

Picking a server close to you has a minimal effect on your mining performance.  The server load has a much higher chance of affecting your performance.  If your miners have trouble with frequent idles, it is recommended you check the website server status widget and relocate your miners to a server identifying either LOW or Normal load.

The urls once again are:  uswest.btcguild.com , useast.btcguild.com , nl.btcguild.com , uk.btcguild.com


Many patches were applied to server configurations today, and it has shown a dramatic increase in overall server performance.

There is now a link titled "Reset to Prior Email" next to the change email button.

The problem was actually US West being unable to connect to the other servers (US East being top on the list).  It's been sorted out.  Moving the website off of the US West pool server is still a project I'm working on, but right now other issues have taken priority.

I can tell you with full certainty that if anything was hacked, it was either at your email, or your computer itself.  Even if a security flaw were in BTC Guild's database, the hash retrieved for your password is strongly salted.  The salt cannot be retrieved without the person having shell access to the server, at which point they would certainly be going straight for the server's wallet, not users.  Even if the salted passwords were pulled from the database, they would be useless in trying to access another site like MtGox.

I'm adding a "Revert to Prior Email" option right now so you can force the server to restore your original email address.  I highly recommend you change your EMAIL PASSWORD if you haven't already.  Given the attacker hit multiple sites, that is the common weakness.

CPU miners can still handle difficulty 2 shares in a reasonable time, and they'll be worth twice as much.  It will increase the variance for them a bit, but in the long run it will average out.  The pool would have to get an average block solve time of under 15 minutes (which would require over 50% of the network if difficulty was roughly accurate, and I won't allow the pool to reach that level even if the users tried) before it could really hurt a CPU miner.  That is the point where some CPU miners would have a hard time getting a single share completed before the next long poll.