As I stated at 2am, I credited users for that super-long round by 3x of super-long round reward. Your miners worked, but because of some bug in server stats I don't have scores for these rounds, so I included reward from these blocks to the next recorded round.

Yes, I'm aware of this and debugging the server now. I'll keep you updated if I'll find anything.

Edit: Looks like that bitcoind is occasionally timing out on block submission. I used quite strict timeout settings on bitcoind connections, so I changed it and it should help. Still don't understand why this started to happen, pool load is fine and I didn't changed anything in this area for many weeks.

maxi75, I'm sorry for hear this. But it looks like you had connection issues near the end of that long round. Can you check proxy log for any connection errors?

Although I restarted backends on the old pool, Stratum has been stable all the time. I also see that other running miners got the expected reward for this round, so there no reason to think that your lower reward was caused by any pool issue.

VeeMiner - same for you.

Users mining for the last super-extra long round has been credited for 3x their standard block reward.

Ok, looks like I found something. One backend didn't restart succesfully on last update and it has been running on older pool source code. All "skipped" blocks were generated by him and I also found some related errors in the log. Backend is now restarted and running on latest pool sources. I'll keep eyes on him, but I expect it will be fine now. Of course I'll add skipped rewards to some following rounds.

I see. Looks like I'm going to have a nice debugging session now. Looks like mysql issue...

pekv2, I didn't tested it myself, but replacing old binary with new one should work nicely.

Edit: I tested it and it don't work. Newest poclbm has slightly different parameters, so it requires small change in GUIminer...

Sitarow - I just released 0.8.3 which suppress annoying message about share below difficulty. Update, if it will scary you, otherwise 0.8.2 is fine :-).

Yes, now poclbm has native (and tested) stratum support...

New version of poclbm just released. It fixes one bug with Stratum and I strongly recommend you the update.

Mining proxy 0.8.2 is out, introducing some workarounds for miner's bugs. I recommend to update.

Hm, without a proxy log I cannot debug this more. It would be useful if you will be able to store proxy log when this happen next time. Btw I just relased 0.8.2 and I recommend to update the proxy.

Exactly. Difficulty is per Stratum connection, not per worker.


Are you sure your first Stratum proxy is on latest version? I'm doing some tweaks many times per day (there are so many stupid bugs in various miners!), so updating stratum frequently is quite a good idea.

I'll release 0.8.2 in few moments, where higher difficulty won't be propagated to the miners.

Well, miners still can work on diff1 shares and proxy will filter out these shares which don't meet difficulty requested by pool server. If there's any bug in the miner regards to difficulty calculations, it should not be triggered by readjustment difficulty by stratum server, because new difficulty won't be propagated into the miner itself.

Hm, any error in proxy log?

I didn't said that "some your rigs", but "all your rigs (together)". I'm almost sure that submission rate for all your rigs together is one per few seconds, which is the purpose of difficulty recalculations. Except when Eleuthria had a bug in his implementation.

Hm, I'm thinking that the best solution is to *not* advertise higher difficulty to the miner, but filter our low-diff shares directly in proxy (it is already doing that check). Looks like some miners have serious issues with diff!=1.

Joshwaa - what is your total hashrate? Actually hashrate of one particular worker doesn't mean anything, if all your rigs are still able to produce one share per few seconds.

That stratum node running on california.stratum.bitcoin.cz is mostly my playground for testing new things and it is likely misconfigured. I'll try to repair Electrum services there.

Well, I'll try to explain it.

Stratum is just a protocol, like HTTP/FTP/Jabber/whatever. Stratum has been designed for Electrum to replace it's original wire protocol which had some drawbacks and current Electrum client/servers uses Stratum protocol to talk each other.

Stratum is based on JSON-RPC and you can read the basic concept on http://stratum.bitcoin.cz - that Google document there is probably the best summary to start with.

Stratum protocol allows servers to expose services. For example, Electrum servers are exposing blockchain-related services, so Electrum clients can ask for address history and so on.

Now about confusion with Electrum and Stratum mining protocol; Stratum mining is just a service exposed by some mining pools, giving the opportunity to connected clients to mine bitcoins over very lightweight protocol. Usage of Stratum wire format is the only relation between Electrum and Stratum mining.

Thanks to this concept, it's quite possible that some Electrum backend servers will expose Stratum mining service as well, so lightweight clients using Stratum protocol will be able to request address balance and mine bitcoins over the same connection at the same time...

Joshwaa, which kind of problems? Do you see any errors?