Is it possible we have a bona fide fork in the p2pool share chain? That is, someone generated a share that was incompatible with v16, causing v16 nodes to reject it and fork away. That v15 chain continued building, and is the reason we're seeing massive influx of invalid shares on v16 nodes. New pools starting up now have a (small) chance of picking up the old v15 chain, which causes the v15 shares to get propagated to the network. As independent nodes connect to both v15 and v16 nodes, the poor performance we see starts to happen - massive lumps of shares appear, requiring huge CPU time to process, since they don't integrate neatly with the existing share chain. In the end, the incompatible shares are rejected, but they still take time to handle. (To be clear, this is just a guess at what's going on in terms of the big picture. Jtoomim seems to have a handle on the technical aspects of why the performance is poor.)

That would make sense, except for one thing - p2pool shares only have a limited lifetime (less than two days?), and I've been seeing this message for much longer than that. Shouldn't the dud share eventually fall off the sharechain anyway? If that's correct, it means there's some scenario where oversized blocks can be created frequently.

I understand and agree with the issue you've opened, but I'm curious about this statement. Did you mean "through the P2Pool network" rather than "BTC network"? The number of shares in the P2Pool sharechain has nothing to do with how many transactions are being processed by the bitcoind daemon at any given moment.

Is something odd going on with P2pool? Check the hashrate and number of miners for the last few hours on this chart:

http://minefast.coincadence.com/p2pool-stats.php

This mirrors what I'm seeing with my own P2pool nodes - one hosted locally with my miner, and one on a VPS. It looks like the miner isn't getting proper responses (?) back from the pool, so it keeps mining without any new work. But it seems it's getting *something* that makes it think the pool is alive, so it's not failing over to the backup pools. In turn, it seems the P2pool node is registering zero hash rate. If I restart the pool and miner, it goes back to normal for a while, then zeros out again.

A quick check of the servers shows that P2pool is hogging 100% CPU time (on one core, of course), and the messages in the text log show it receiving hundreds of new shares.

Currently mining on V16.

Any thoughts?

Edit: An image of the chart at the link above, in case it later turns out to be an unrelated error.

So, I'm running an S9 inside my home (yes, I'm crazy). With the default settings, the fan was unbearably loud. It was just unmanageable. I tried the vent filter trick, and while it cut down the train whistle sound, it also caused a deep echo effect sound to come out, actually increasing the miner's overall volume substantially. I had to take it off.

So, I took advantage of the "max fan speed" setting in the config, and I set it to 40%. At that speed, the fan noise can't be heard through a closed door. Obviously, that's not enough to cool the miner running at full tilt, so I also downclocked the miner to 475 and let it run for an hour or two, then gradually increased the clock rating to ensure it doesn't overheat. Currently I'm clocked at 550MHz, and the temps are about 70-ish for the board and 100-ish for the chips. At present it's hashing at about 11.8 GH/s.  I can probably clock it up another 25MHz or so before it starts throttling. 

Just wanted to throw this out there in case there are other home miners interested in running the S9!

With the old S1s, you could take them apart and put a 200mm fan on each blade to cool them effectively but silently:

https://imgur.com/a/RUAX5

Do you think the same trick would work with the S9s, or would the boards cook themselves? The fans on these suckers are unbearable.

How loud are these compared to, say, an Antminer S1?

Do you know if they work with p2pool?

Thanks.

OK, this is bad.  I haven't gotten anything from any of the blocks in the last 24+ hours. And I have no clue why not.

Edit: P2pool reports:

My UI reports that I currently have 77 shares, and it's been in the 60-80 range pretty consistently for the last several days. I got regular payouts for all the blocks found yesterday (and, in fact, for the last few weeks).  However, I didn't get paid for today's two blocks. Why would that be?

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand.  What's the benefit of pypy in this context? The only thing running Python in this guide is p2pool itself, and it's not like it's stressing out the CPU or anything.

Are these still current and correct?

Thanks for the catch! I'll see what I can do to clean that up.

Sadly, RL has caught up with me, and I've been working 12+ hour days with regularity these last couple of months. Thankfully things are calming down now, so hopefully I'll have more time again to clean this up.

It's not bait-and-switch at all; he explicitly tells you there will be fees in the top post of this thread. You're asking to get exchange rate prices with zero fees. He's absolutely correct; you can only get those at the actual exchange - and even then, you will get charged fees.  I know Coinbase charges 1% or 2%; and I'm sure other exchanges do too.  If you want to buy at the actual exchange price from BB, then the seller must be selling at a negative profit - he will receive less than the exchange price once you account for the BB fee!

The per-seller profit is something that changes, well, per seller. One seller may want 10%; another may be happy with 5%; and as I said, I've bought and sold at 0% before. As others have pointed out, it's up to you to decide whether the offer available when you're looking to buy is worth it for you.

Sayulita can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that each seller can set their own profit target - that 10% figure. The 2% is what sayulita charges for the matchmaking. In the past, I've frequently bought and sold bitcoins at 0% profit margin, and the most I remember paying is just 1-2% on top of the BB fee. It all depends on what the seller is asking for. If you don't like the price, you can ask if there's another seller (perhaps at another bank) with a lower fee.

It's not that different from localbitcoins.com. Each seller there (or buyer!) can set their target price to whatever they like, even double the benchmark rate if they so choose.

Sheesh, fair point. OK, here's to ... multiple singles of blocks per day! ... yeah ... that doesn't sound nearly as inspiring, but hey, I'll take it.

Here's looking forward to tens of blocks per day! *overly-optimistic thumbs up*

Oh, believe me, I'm not complaining about the much better frequency of payouts! I'm just wondering at the sudden and abrupt change in the amount of the payout.  I've seen my payouts change over a multi-day period before, due the variance in finding shares with my relatively small 200GH or because I go through a period of downtime for a few hours. I've just never seen it drop by an order of magnitude in less than a day before unless I had completely turned off all my mining rigs.

I don't understand if you're looking to hire a lawyer, or if you are a lawyer or law firm seeking new clients.  If it's the latter, the lack of clear communication is worrying to say the least.

I'm seeing basically the reverse.  My number of shares is about the same as it was before (maybe a 20% drop or so; that's normal for me), but my payout has dropped to 1/10th of what it was yesterday.  I'm puzzled at how huge a change that is in such a short period. I know variance can be a pain, but this is different.  It suggests a massive influx of hashing power to the network over the last day or two.

There's a magic word I use frequently to get computers and electronic equipment in line.  It works wonders.  Just get close to the misbehaving gizmo, stare deep into its innards (or its case, if it's sealed), and quietly whisper, "Defenestration!"  It means to throw out of a window, preferably from a very tall building.

To be fair, it may not always work ... but it's certainly therapeutic for me!