Sorry about that JWU42. Tomorrow we'll be rolling out the first in a series of patches that will alleviate your issue.

Thanks for letting us know. The miner effectiveness page was broken because of an over-tight security setting. I just fixed it, enjoy!

MC

Missed your post initially; to answer your question: Our systems are behind Amazon's load balancers, which cannot be pinged. To gauge response time you may time a fetch of http://www.abcpool.co/ping.php; it should be comparable to ping response time.

EDIT: This made me think.. why wouldn't the load balancers be pingable? So I poked around until I poked a little hole; and now pool.abcpool.co can be pinged

By the way, for those concerned about ping times: each 100ms of ping-time translates to only 0.017% invalid shares. In the grand scheme of things quite insignificant.

Hi guys,

We've hit another checkpoint on our way up the GH/s scale. That means registration has closed again while we analyze load patterns and prepare our systems for further scaling.

Registration will most likely open up again after the weekend. If you'd like a heads up, send chlorine or me a PM and you'll be the first to know when signing up is possible again.

MC

Just as individual miners goes to a pool to limit their risk, ABCPool also employs other pools to limit risk. That way we can offer you our risk free PPS service for such a low fee.

If a block is found at any of the pools we direct your hashes to, we receive a small payout. Many small payouts even out to a more predictable payout pattern than the several big payouts we would have when purely running our own bitcoind for mining. We use these payouts to pay your fixed PPS rewards.

A word about the term 'proxy'. Technically we're not a proxy, as we don't act on your behalf; look it up in the dictionary. Since it's now common vocabulary/jargon in the mining business, for now we'll stick with being described as a proxy. The first mining proxies were actually proxies in the dictionary-sense of the word, passing through both work and earnings directly, some running on your own computer, and some on a server. That also means that risk was passed on 1:1. When pools like ours emerged people also started calling them proxies, though we in fact establish a seperate and very different contract with our miners for a fixed PPS fee, thus transforming the risk of mining at DGM, Prop, Score, etc. pools to the risk free reward model of PPS.

Since the beginning of july we've been offline for about 75 minutes, so that's >99.8% uptime.

We'll be online all day for your hashing pleasure. And also the days, weeks and months after that into the foreseeable future

Anything specific we can help you with?

Thanks for your report spccioli. We're well aware of the issue. Keeping everyone continuously provided with work is our main development priority right now. You're completely correct in that it's not an easy task; First there's the load spike of all longpollers that need to be triggered, and immediately after that all miners will start refilling their internal queue by asking for even more work. Due to our nature as a pool of pools, we're generally among the first to hear about a new block. But that also means that we cannot reasonably keep dealing out saved-up work we know will only produce orphaned blocks; it would be a shameful waste of computing resources. There's still a couple of tricks in our bag that will improve response times after a block find though, and we're implementing those now.

MC

That's a helpful table right there I was keeping a similar table myself, coming to the same conclusions: the difference has now stopped growing.

First: The issue is solved. Rest assured, balances have always displayed the right amount of earnings. The inaccurate share count built up until now remains though, because the over-counted shares remain in our historical records. It would be too time-consuming to correct these. From now on the reported number of shares will grow in the same pace as balances again.

The issue is something that has been affecting the share count of all miners for a while now as it turns out. Thanks to your attentiveness (and let's not forget, a long code review sesion by Chlorine and me!) share accrual is now finally accurate again. It was most likely over-counting between 0.5-2.0%, judging from a DB analysis.

As mentioned before, balance accrual is done directly from the submitted shares. Stats calculation on the other hand, is a separate multi-stage process where the shares get tossed around and massaged into various useful bits of information. These help us manage the pool, and help you manage your miners.

[i had typed up a detailed report here, but it has some technical details that may be helpful to attackers, so I've yanked it. The gist is: one of the stats-stages had a subtle bug which became an issue once the pool grew.]

So, thanks again Mykel, now I hope you may finally start to enjoy the pool for a bit!

MC

Dear miners,

Today is an important day for your favorite little pool.. It’s exactly one year since ABCPool was first introduced to the world!

I remember our first users; it was pretty exciting. We’d say to each other: ‘Wow, this guy has 3GH/s, all by himself!’; and ‘hey, there’s another user, now we’ve already got 3 people hashing  at the same time!’. It seemed crazy: We only had a small mining rig ourselves, and there they were, all these people coming in, collectively bringing their gigahashes to the table..

That was then. Now, hundreds of people are connecting to ABCPool every day, and together we represent a significant piece of the hashrate-pie. ABCPool has grown tremendously over the past year, but the premise is the same as a year ago: steady earnings, day in day out.

To keep up with you guys, there have been countless improvements to the site, as many performance optimizations to the backend code, and we’ve scaled up our systems several times. Never a dull moment!

We’d like to use this opportunity to thank *you*, our loyal members, for your continued allegiance and trust in our little pool. Without you, ABCPool would be a hollow shell. And it wasn’t all fun and games: You’ve  stuck by us through some pretty rough times. We/you were stolen from three times and we’ve even had a botnet bring us down for a few days. But we struggled and the pool came out alright in the end!

By the way, we’ve got some pretty exciting stuff in the development pipeline right now. Stick around and when the time is right we’ll show you!

Thanks & Happy hashing,
Your pool ops as always,

MC & Chlorine

PS: Right now we’re working on MykelSilver’s problem; a  thorough examination of statistics scripts is underway. While account balance is calculated directly from incoming shares, share-count numbers are tossed around several times before appearing in your stats. We’re writing alternative (redundant) means of calculation for everything now, which will most likely flush out the problem.

I'm looking into it.

I'm sorry you feel that way, but glad you brought it up, so I could do something about it. I've just moved the fee-message right next to the payout button for even greater visibility, and increased the payout threshold. The fee for transactions <0.2BTC remains though, because it prevents spamming the Bitcoin network with small transactions.

I've also just sent 0.01 BTC to your payment address to ease your pain.. Cheers!

Happy hashing,
MC

The past week the invalid rate has been rising a bit, because of the increased network speed. Invalid shares occur each time right after a block has been reported, normally every 10 minutes. They even out to a certain percentage of your hashrate. Since blocks were reported more often recently, invalids have been at a higher percentage too.

We've also been playing around with server improvements that required some restarts, which may have also slightly added to your invalid rates.

Restart your miners to take full advantage of the improvements!

Hi 420,
Please PM chlorine your desired donation amount, and he will change it for you.
Happy hashing,
MC

I'm looking at the metrics, and the pool handles your 140Gh well. Based on these observations I'd say another 300Gh can easily be accommodated with the same level of service, in case you're looking to expand .

You're handing in some quality shares too; the poolwide invalid rate is down to 0.06% averaged over the past 70 minutes.

I don't know how big your operation is now, but we should be able to handle an additional 300GH easily. As we get to that point, we'll re-evaluate the performance metrics to see if further growth needs further scaling.

Hi guys,

We've scaled up the pool hardware and reconfigured the software, alleviating the performance issues of the past month and creating room for growth again.

That means registration has re-opened!

Happy hashing,
MC

Payments were offline for an hour or so while we upgraded the payment bitcoind. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yes they are. I'm looking into the stuck stats now.

For the last hour, payments have been offline while we did some wallet maintenance. Payments are now enabled again.

Several of you noticed experienced disconnections from ABCPool in the recent period (aside from the Amazon power failure of course..). During the past few days further maintenance was performed to alleviate this. Maintenance is still ongoing in order to get ABCPool stability back to the levels you were used to. Nevertheless you should already notice significant improvements now!

Happy hashing,
MC