[1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool

[TheHarbinger]

Well, I hate to do it, but I just pulled my 2GH/s from P2Pool.  Something is very seriously wrong.  I have been keeping it up to date, so don't tell me it's me version of p2pool or bitcoin, it's not.  Over the last 4 days I have watched my payout per block drop from around 0.4 to 0.15 on the last one, and p2pool.info is showing 950MH/s.  I will come back, but after what ever the hell is broken is fixed.

Were you getting more orphaned or dead shares, or was the number of shares that you got decreasing?

No, everything local stayed the same.  Orphaned/dead stayed around 5% overall, still cranking out shares about every 25 minutes, nothing here reporting errors anywhere.  Just a steady decrease in hashrate shown at p2pool.info and a steady decline in payout values.  It's like over 50% of my hashrate/shares are leaving my end, but aren't making it into the chain.

I just did a fresh install of Bitcoin 0.6.0r2 and p2pool on the server and re-downloaded the chains on both of them, going to give it until tomorrow morning to see if that fixed it, if not, i have to pull out back to a pool until the problem is located.

Seems like a fresh install and re-downloading of both chains fixed whatever was going on.  While i would like to get to the bottom of whatever caused this, I will be making no attempt to replicate it, sorry.   

[twmz]

A couple p2pool.info updates...

Donations/Subsidies

I was thinking it would be cool if p2pool.info listed how much has been donated as subsidies.  Maybe that could be added into the luck calculation, too.

I updated p2pool.info to include a list of donations/subsidy payments.  I decided not to include them in the luck calculation.

I detect these transactions by looking for any transaction that includes payments to 10 or more known p2pool miner addresses (I have a list of basically all the addresses that have ever submitted a share).  I think this is a pretty robust approach as long as there aren't any donations that go to less than 10 people.  If that ever happens and someone lets me know, I can manually add that transaction to the list.

JSON API

It may not have been obvious, but the way that p2pool.info actually works is that all of the things you see on the web page are rendered in your local browser with client-side, javascript code.  The web page gets all the data it uses via a series of ajax requests to retrieve JSON data from the p2pool.info web server.

On the chance that someone may find something interesting to do with the JSON data, I decided to CORS enable them.  So feel free to use this data to make awesome things.  Please to not make a zillion requests to my web server though, because while I can easily scale out to handle more load (yay, Cloud!), I don't want to have to do so just for the JSON API because it costs me money.  If these APIs get abused, I'll have to remove access to them.

• http://p2pool.info/stats
• http://p2pool.info/blocks
• http://p2pool.info/payouts
• http://p2pool.info/users
• http://p2pool.info/donations

The stats and blocks endpoints can also be used to retrieve deltas:

• http://p2pool.info/stats?from=1331343000000
• http://p2pool.info/blocks?from=170422

P.S.  If the response to any of these JSON APIs is not self explanatory, feel free to just ask.

[ragnard]

I've been P2Pool mining for a week now with about 600MH/s.  So far so good.  However, I'm trying to understand something.  I keep a running tail on my log file to see the shares I get and blocks found.  Today, there were two blocks found which I did not get any shares during the round.  However, my bitcoin client shows income under "Mined" at the precise time those blocks were found.  I thought I only get paid for shares I find and if a block is found that I didn't find a share, I would receive no payment on it.  Looks like I'm wrong.  Can anyone clarify and set me straight?

[twmz]

I've been P2Pool mining for a week now with about 600MH/s.  So far so good.  However, I'm trying to understand something.  I keep a running tail on my log file to see the shares I get and blocks found.  Today, there were two blocks found which I did not get any shares during the round.  However, my bitcoin client shows income under "Mined" at the precise time those blocks were found.  I thought I only get paid for shares I find and if a block is found that I didn't find a share, I would receive no payment on it.  Looks like I'm wrong.  Can anyone clarify and set me straight?

P2Pool uses the PPLNS payment scheme.  Every time a block is found, the previous "N" shares get paid.  N is 3 times the number of shares needed to find a block on average.  At the moment, N=7546.

Note, all of the past N shares get paid even if they were submitted before a previous block was found.  Yes, that means that a single share can result in you getting paid for multiple blocks.  In fact, on average, you should get paid for 3 blocks for every share that you find.  When we are lucky, you'll get paid in more than 3 blocks.  When we are unlucky, you'll get paid for fewer.

[ragnard]

twmz and Holliday,

Thank you very much for the information.  I had read that when I first started but it just didn't click in my head.  Now it makes sense and it makes me like p2pool even more.  Thanks again.

[ChanceCoats123]

Any BTC we make from donations doesn't get added to the [mined] payments, right? I haven't gotten any part of a donation in a while.

[tomtheminer]

Can anyone help me, when i try to do this:

 b. Right click the new shortcut and choose properties. Click in the "target" box and move the cursor to the far right. Put a space after cgminer.exe and type: -o http://127.0.0.1:9332 -u noob -p sauce

My computer says i can't use the : and // in the file name? How to fix this?

[Krak]

Can anyone help me, when i try to do this:

 b. Right click the new shortcut and choose properties. Click in the "target" box and move the cursor to the far right. Put a space after cgminer.exe and type: -o http://127.0.0.1:9332 -u noob -p sauce

My computer says i can't use the : and // in the file name? How to fix this?

Put quotation marks around the file location before adding the flags.

[tomtheminer]

when i do that i get an error message:

The name: C:/......./.... specified in the target box is not valid. make sure the path and file name are correct?

[tomtheminer]

just putting a space and typing it, i dont delete anything...?

[tomtheminer]

There are quotes around it by default, so dont know what's going wrong?

[TheHarbinger]

Just launch it using a .bat file.   

[tomtheminer]

Just launch it using a .bat file.   

sorry, can you explain how to do that?

[tomtheminer]

I solved it, it must be outside the quotation marks,

Code:

"C:\****\cgminer.exe" -o http://127.0.0.1:9332 -u noob -p sauce

[tomtheminer]

Another problem, when i start cgminer it says: all devices disabled, cannot mine!    ??

[ancow]

Another problem, when i start cgminer it says: all devices disabled, cannot mine!    ??

That is not a p2pool problem and the cgminer thread is that way: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402

You may want to post the output of "cgminer -n" when posting there and consider doing a debug run (add " -T -D --verbose" at the end of the current command).

[NothinG]

When I try to startup p2pool, during the RPC connection phase it crashes my bitcoind.

(I'm testing with a server using CPU mining, so don't laugh at my specs.)

Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit
Bitcoin 0.5.2
p2pool (version 1f87c32)

Running p2pool:

Code:

C:\Users\{USER}\Desktop\p2pool\run_p2pool.exe {user} {password}

This is the error I'm getting.

Code:

2012-03-10 21:00:03.966000 p2pool (version 1f87c32)
2012-03-10 21:00:03.966000 
2012-03-10 21:00:03.967000 Testing bitcoind RPC connection to 'http://127.0.0.1:8332/' with username '{user}'...
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Error getting work from bitcoind:
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Traceback (most recent call last):
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Failure: twisted.internet.defer.TimeoutError: Getting http://127.0.0.1:8332/ took longer than 5 seconds.

{user} and {password} have been replaced.

[echris1]

When I try to startup p2pool, during the RPC connection phase it crashes my bitcoind.

(I'm testing with a server using CPU mining, so don't laugh at my specs.)

Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit
Bitcoin 0.5.2
p2pool (version 1f87c32)

Running p2pool:

Code:

C:\Users\{USER}\Desktop\p2pool\run_p2pool.exe {user} {password}

This is the error I'm getting.

Code:

2012-03-10 21:00:03.966000 p2pool (version 1f87c32)
2012-03-10 21:00:03.966000 
2012-03-10 21:00:03.967000 Testing bitcoind RPC connection to 'http://127.0.0.1:8332/' with username '{user}'...
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Error getting work from bitcoind:
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Traceback (most recent call last):
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Failure: twisted.internet.defer.TimeoutError: Getting http://127.0.0.1:8332/ took longer than 5 seconds.

{user} and {password} have been replaced.

Have your bitcoind downloaded the entire blockchain?  Because until it does P2Pool will keep spitting this message out.  When I restart my P2Pool machine it always says this for a little bit until bitcoind syncs up the blockchain again.  The first time can take a long time, I believe it took almost a day to download the whole blockchain again.

[NothinG]

When I try to startup p2pool, during the RPC connection phase it crashes my bitcoind.

(I'm testing with a server using CPU mining, so don't laugh at my specs.)

Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit
Bitcoin 0.5.2
p2pool (version 1f87c32)

Running p2pool:

Code:

C:\Users\{USER}\Desktop\p2pool\run_p2pool.exe {user} {password}

This is the error I'm getting.

Code:

2012-03-10 21:00:03.966000 p2pool (version 1f87c32)
2012-03-10 21:00:03.966000 
2012-03-10 21:00:03.967000 Testing bitcoind RPC connection to 'http://127.0.0.1:8332/' with username '{user}'...
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Error getting work from bitcoind:
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Traceback (most recent call last):
2012-03-10 21:00:08.975000 > Failure: twisted.internet.defer.TimeoutError: Getting http://127.0.0.1:8332/ took longer than 5 seconds.

{user} and {password} have been replaced.

Have your bitcoind downloaded the entire blockchain?  Because until it does P2Pool will keep spitting this message out.  When I restart my P2Pool machine it always says this for a little bit until bitcoind syncs up the blockchain again.  The first time can take a long time, I believe it took almost a day to download the whole blockchain again.

Yeah, I think I was messing around with some of the configuration and got an error saying the whole blockchain wasn't downloaded.
So, I'm working on that right now. I'll post back when it's done; and it's been 3 hours since I started Bitcoind and it's at block ~160k so shouldn't be too much longer.

[Edit]: I've got it up and going.

[Ente]

Yep, I had the same phenomenom, bitcoin-qt easily crashes when it is loading the blockchain and is already being molested by p2pool ;-)
bitcoind doesnt seem to crash in that situation, but I wanted to watch the process..

It seems like p2pool does nothing until it can connect to an up-to-date bitcoin instance. I would prefer that it would already connect to the p2pool network and load its share-chain, for example, to save time.

Ente