Oh, and the minimum payout threshold is now 0.01, enjoy :-).

Fine, so the database is migrated. One reboot of stratum backend was enough, as expected. Current average load on database: 0.00 0.04 0.13  .... pretty nice :-)

Unfortunately the website is stil f***ing slow, because now the website is on different datacenter and there's some latency between website and db. I'll eventually fix this by moving website to the same datacenter.

I'm migrating the database right now. Website is off, pool will be just restarted in few minutes.

I'll set minimal threshold back to 0.01. Considering current rise in price, threshold 0.05 is quite big for common users...

Judging because of extremely rare 2/10 second rounds? People are upset when the luck is bad,  but people are also upset when the luck is good... :-) I don't remember how such "good luck" happen last time, it is really rare.

scrybe, thanks for improvement! It looks bitcoincharts.com historical API is down right now, so I cannot check it. But please fix syntax error in your commit :-).

Can you make pull request to my git? Once I get it working, I'll merge it.

Also thanks to everybody who helps me answering these newbie questions here on forum, on IRC and FB!

I have been on some conferences and I also took a short break in recent days; that's one reason why I didn't respond to many questions here, on FB page and from email.

The second reason is that it began impossible to respond to everybody, because in recent days I had a storm of emails of any kind. I even have many phone calls a day "where can I buy ASIC and is it worth the money?". Once I realized that I spend over three hours a day just by responding to common questions, I decided to stop answering such questions at all. Maybe it sounds impolite, but pool now has over 160.000 registered people and answering their questions distracts me from any real work. In contrary to situation a year or two ago, now there're many manuals, howtos and FAQs about mining, ASIC etc so I don't think answering everything personally is needed anymore.

I'm writing regards to recent issues on pool. You may notice that there're some consistency issues on Stats page, e.g. rounds 17370/17371, website also sometimes hangs with "in maintenance" message. The reason is overloaded database; just in last month, the traffic on website quadrupled, much more people started using some monitoring tools polling the API from their widgets, others are refreshing profile page again and again; the traffic on website is just crazy. This *doesn't* affect mining, because mining backends are completely asynchronous - shares are queued and registered to the database lazily, which also explains these inconsistences in statistics page for very short rounds.

On friday I ordered new database machine which will take such load, which was prepared yesterday. I'm finishing the configuration and at today's night I'll migrate database there. There'll be just a ~15 minute downtime of website and few-second downtime of mining (backend restarts). I believe that it fixes all website issue.

I had performance issues with website yesterday, so I limit it to 5 records temporary. Profile page is one of the most loaded page on the site.

I disabled block processing, I'm doing site maintenance. Pool will process blocks in few minutes.

It seems working again...

Looks like bitcoincharts.com API has changed or is down. Anybody know any information?

I'll think about it. I still don't see the advantage of LTC, except mining speculation.

This one was a glitch on server side, it's fine now.

It won't work like this. Network split will cause more blockchain branches, impossibility to move coins (so technically you'll have coins, but you won't be able to spend them for bread) and also panic on markets and price drop. Gold: unaffected :-P.

I agree. As a money, bitcoins are much better than gold. But Bitcoin is too young, currently it is still a wild speculation to future value and it isn't smart to use it as a *store* of value.

I'm bullish in bitcoin, but I still keep in bitcoins only money which I'm afford to lose.

The chance that bitcoin will cost $0 tomorrow is a bit higher than the gold price will drop to its "industry price" anytime soon. Especially when bitcoin requires hi-tech environment (electricity, internet access), but gold doesn't.

Real estate, gold. There's little chance that you wake up and your house or gold bars will have zero value. Although it's quite possible with bitcoins.

There's no fee.

Please update to lastest cgminer, it has much better network layer and it can reconnect correctly.

It works all time, but it looks like some peering issues on internet. The good thing is that stratum.bitcoin.cz works, because it is on another location.