A guide for mining efficiently on P2Pool, includes FUD repellent and FAQ

[-ck]

p2pool is effectively a different block chain and cgminer stores a database of blocks as they come out so it would confuse it to run p2pool and regular btc mining. Provided p2pool is the primary pool, and you set failover-only it still should be okay.

[gyverlb]

p2pool is effectively a different block chain and cgminer stores a database of blocks as they come out so it would confuse it to run p2pool and regular btc mining. Provided p2pool is the primary pool, and you set failover-only it still should be okay.

It seems it works fine without failover-only and the latest cgminer versions on my setup: as long as the P2Pool node is fast enough I guess you don't need failover-only (it may be a worthwhile precaution to add it though).

[gyverlb]

Updated guide: --failover-only recommended.

[Amph]

hopefully, i'm fine without tweaking anything, 121 efficiency here, but it still say orphaned 0, is this a problem?
another problem is that the last version of p2pool don't work for me, it say:"error bitcoin version to old, upgrade to 0.5 or newer!", but i have already 0.8.1 version...

btw, i'm mining the same amount of BTC guild for now, i hope i can make more

[zvs]

hopefully, i'm fine without tweaking anything, 121 efficiency here, but it still say orphaned 0, is this a problem?
another problem is that the last version of p2pool don't work for me, it say:"error bitcoin version to old, upgrade to 0.5 or newer!", but i have already 0.8.1 version...

btw, i'm mining the same amount of BTC guild for now, i hope i can make more

litecoin?  it said the same thing to me when i spent some time with the litecoin p2pool.  i just removed the thing about upgrading from the source

[Amph]

no, no litecoin here, how can i run the 3.1 without the error, saying that i have a old version?

[gyverlb]

You should probably ask questions about errors in log in the P2Pool thread

[Amph]

dead link

[gyverlb]

dead link

Fixed, the forum doesn't like quotes around an URL?!

[Searinox]

With bfgminer: does --dyn-gpuinterval <number> override --intensity? Is dyngpu the equivalent of saying "i want my desktop to have no less than 1000/<number> frames per second"? I set the option to the recommended 50 and it felt like everything onscreen was lagging. Intuitively I put it at 20fps and figured out it may be that. So then I changed the interval to 16(which is the rounded result for 60fps) and everything went back to normal. How does this impact my mining though?

[gyverlb]

With bfgminer: does --dyn-gpuinterval <number> override --intensity? Is dyngpu the equivalent of saying "i want my desktop to have no less than 1000/<number> frames per second"? I set the option to the recommended 50 and it felt like everything onscreen was lagging. Intuitively I put it at 20fps and figured out it may be that. So then I changed the interval to 16(which is the rounded result for 60fps) and everything went back to normal. How does this impact my mining though?

The lower dyn-gpuinterval is, the more often your system must submit work to the GPU. There is a performance penalty but it depends on your actual setup (GPU performance, CPU speed, system load, OS, ...), you'll have to let it run for a while undisturbed and check the hashrate averages to see at which point it becomes noticeable for you.

[Searinox]

I always find it weird how my P2Pool hashrate keeps fluctuating even in idle, sometimes reaching as high as 280Mh/s or dropping as low as 110Mh/s. I have my miner set up as recommended for my card. Is there anything I can do about it or is this not the miner/setup's fault and rather p2pool's?

[gyverlb]

I always find it weird how my P2Pool hashrate keeps fluctuating even in idle, sometimes reaching as high as 280Mh/s or dropping as low as 110Mh/s. I have my miner set up as recommended for my card. Is there anything I can do about it or is this not the miner/setup's fault and rather p2pool's?

This is a question for the main P2Pool thread.

[Amph]

what this line really do? what is the benefit?
-Q 0 -g 1 --intensity d --gpu-dyninterval 50

with this line, my intensity is set to 9, but i found that intensity 7 is the best for 7950

[gyverlb]

what this line really do? what is the benefit?
-Q 0 -g 1 --intensity d --gpu-dyninterval 50

with this line, my intensity is set to 9, but i found that intensity 7 is the best for 7950

The cgminer's README explains all these values. It's surprising that a lower intensity is better on a 7950, if your card behaves this way, you can lower the gpu-dyninterval value. Assuming the system is dedicated to mining, each time it's halved the intensity should be reduced by 1.

[Amph]

with intensity 7 i mine 575 mh, instead with int 9 only 550

above 9 nothing change, the max is still 575

[gyverlb]

Fixed a typo in the guide, the bitcoin P2P port is 8333 not 8332, if you setup QoS with high priority for port 8332, you should change it to 8333.

Updated the Avalon section with suggestions. There's no documented way to configure Avalon for P2Pool properly, but there have been partial reports. If you have Avalon(s) please report your success/failures with P2Pool here.

[gyverlb]

Given the extreme bitcoind tunings seen in the P2Pool thread that would hurt everyone's income I added a more detailed bitcoind tuning guide designed to give optimal getblocktemplate latencies.

[gyverlb]

Updated the guide with latest test results with bitcoind-git (with performance patch). bitcoind-0.8.2rc3 behaves the same.

Conclusion: it's time to upgrade bitcoind and tune bitcoin.conf to get more fees out of each block. You can probably stop worrying about high getblocktemplate latencies too (see the guide itself for details).

[gyverlb]

Update: new FAQ entry for low memory (~1GB) server.