Is balanced mining still possible on an Antminer S9

[12Core]

I’m new enough to mining and I’ve looked everywhere to try and figure this out but I think at this stage I need to ask here as someone will know. Here is what I’ve gleaned so far if someone could confirm.

1. Balanced mining used to be possible on older firmware. (Cgminer)
2. BMminer replaced Cgminer on newly shipped (2017 onwards) S9’s.
3. Cgminer was required for Balanced Mining.
4. Putty was required into Cgminer to do the load balancing.
5. The latest firmware prevents you from downgrading to Cgminer.
6. Nobody has found a solution to this as of yet.

I’ve looked at these two threads below but they’ve gone dead, I assume because of point 2 above.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395721.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=623672

I really would like to point 90% of my power to Slush pool to mine BTC and 10% to somewhere like Multipool to mine BCH, DGB or other altcoins.
If anyone can confirm the above and let me know if there is a solution I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks

[ccgllc]

Balanced mining never worked well.  The switching time caused massive efficiency problems.

If you want to do 90/10, your better off either using (10) miners, (9) on one and (1) on the other, or manually switching once an hour (or whatever interval your comfortable with).

[fanatic26]

Balanced mining never worked well.  The switching time caused massive efficiency problems.

If you want to do 90/10, your better off either using (10) miners, (9) on one and (1) on the other, or manually switching once an hour (or whatever interval your comfortable with).

He hit the nail on the head here. There is a reason its not offered on the current generation miners.

[12Core]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I thought the whole point of balanced mining was there was no switching.
You simply point 90% of your power at slush and 10% at Multipool, in my example.

I think you used to be able to do:

90;Stratum X
10; Stratum Y

To make it work, simple as that, no switching involved.
Even if I could point 1 of the hashing boards (33.3% of power) it'd be something.

Maybe I'm confused as to how it worked as I never actually saw it in operation.
If I'm wrong in what I describe above I'd love to hear more about it and if it's possible.

Thanks

[ccgllc]

*sigh*  Its not that simple.  Your mining rig is sent a series of commands, typically something like "Try nounce Ac357B2 with difficulty 123" and then all the chips work on that.  Since different pools (much less different cons) will have different parameters, balancing is actually performed by switching those parameters on some time basis.  Lets just say 1 second for sake of discussion.  So every second your chips have to stop what they are doing and start over with new parameters.  Same thing you see when mining a single pool and you get a "work restart" and/or "block detected" message.

[12Core]

Ah, ok.
So Balancing is really switching by a different name where your asic would point for 90 sec out of 100 at pool A, and then disconnect to spend 10 seconds pointed at pool B.
I didn't think it worked like that at all.

Thanks for the info ccgllc.