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

[PatMan]

On a side note - what's the record for the longest period without finding a block? I have a feeling it's gonna be broken shortly......

(we usually find one when I mention something about it - let's hope it happens again.....soon )

Over 4 days.... looks like we will have lots of short blocks soon ;]

What - twice in three months? I wouldn't bet on it......

[stevegee58]

I've been mining LTC on p2pool for almost a week now.  The pool seems to solve over 20 blocks per day.

[maqifrnswa]

I still don't see why a slightly longer share chain long poll time would be bad. It would let the slower miners get a share in easier before being cut off and helps higher latency. It would benefit just about everyone. It's still PPLNS so the payouts would still be equal to the balance of shares.

Longer LP means higher difficulty ...

yes, but it will be a pittance compared to ASIC. I'm using +32 difficulty now. I would go even higher but p2pool has problems or the work DOA because of age.

The real problem is the DOA because of latency, and whether we should change p2pool just for Avalons. BFL single FPGAs don't work on p2pool for the exact same reason (latency), and BFL has claimed (for what it's worth) that they designed the SCs so that they will work with p2pool. I don't have much of an opinion either way yet, but I wanted to show the numbers so people know what they are getting in to.

It may seem like a pittance for you now, but when everyone has ASICs it will be noticeable and currently the smaller GPU miners may feel it. And in the future, smaller miners may mean jalapenos, not GPU.

There are currently 241 users on p2pool right now (unique address, at least)
The current variance in pseduoshares is:
86400 seconds/day
10 seconds/pseudoshare
8640 pseudoshares/day
~36 pseudoshares per user per day
Variance = sqrt(36) = 6 shares (or ~17%)


Under the proposed 30 second block time target:
86400 seconds/day
30 seconds/pseudoshare
2880 pseudoshares/day
~12 pseudoshares per user per day
Variance = sqrt(12) = 3.5 shares (or ~29%)


So the average user (which in the future will be an ASIC user) will see  their variance increase from 17% per day to 29% per day. Again, I'm not trying to express an opinion - just show what the numbers are so others can form opinions.

[kano]

I still don't see why a slightly longer share chain long poll time would be bad. It would let the slower miners get a share in easier before being cut off and helps higher latency. It would benefit just about everyone. It's still PPLNS so the payouts would still be equal to the balance of shares.

Longer LP means higher difficulty ...

yes, but it will be a pittance compared to ASIC. I'm using +32 difficulty now. I would go even higher but p2pool has problems or the work DOA because of age.

The real problem is the DOA because of latency, and whether we should change p2pool just for Avalons. BFL single FPGAs don't work on p2pool for the exact same reason (latency), and BFL has claimed (for what it's worth) that they designed the SCs so that they will work with p2pool. I don't have much of an opinion either way yet, but I wanted to show the numbers so people know what they are getting in to.
...

The reason BFL FPGA's suck on p2pool is that it takes ~5s to complete any work and it doesn't respond before the 5s is finished.
Since LP is 10s that means a LARGE % of time wasted/stale/DOA

If it is 60GH/s, a BFL SC Single would take ~72ms to complete any work ... so yeah it's rather obvious it will work fine on p2pool.
It's simply the faster nonce time vs 10s that makes the difference, there is no real difference in the WAY it processes that fixes the problem.

[Richy_T]

Having a little trouble. No luck searching and this thread is a little long to trawl through.

I think I have it all right. bitcoin.conf set up, running the Bitcoin Wallet, running p2pool, can connect with a browser and empty logs show up but when I try to connect with the miner, no luck

04/04/2013 04:56:18, started OpenCL miner on platform 0, device 0 (Cypress)
 04/04/2013 04:56:18, Setting server (noob @ localhost:9332)
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:18, checking for stratum...
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, server error: p2pool is downloading shares
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, no response to getwork, using as stratum
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:20, authorization failed with noob:sauce@localhost:9332
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:23, IO errors - 1, tolerance 2

As far as I know, the username and password should not matter so no idea why this is failing. Any ideas?

Thanks

[K1773R]

Having a little trouble. No luck searching and this thread is a little long to trawl through.

I think I have it all right. bitcoin.conf set up, running the Bitcoin Wallet, running p2pool, can connect with a browser and empty logs show up but when I try to connect with the miner, no luck

04/04/2013 04:56:18, started OpenCL miner on platform 0, device 0 (Cypress)
 04/04/2013 04:56:18, Setting server (noob @ localhost:9332)
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:18, checking for stratum...
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, server error: p2pool is downloading shares
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, no response to getwork, using as stratum
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:20, authorization failed with noob:sauce@localhost:9332
localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:23, IO errors - 1, tolerance 2

As far as I know, the username and password should not matter so no idea why this is failing. Any ideas?

Thanks

cant you read?

Code:

localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, server error: p2pool is downloading shares

[Richy_T]

cant you read?

Code:

localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, server error: p2pool is downloading shares

Indeed I can. I am also capable of drawing logical conclusions. Though I've worked with code enough that not much surprises me, "downloading shares" does not particularly imply a causal link to "authorization denied" to me.

If that is the cause though, I'm happy to take it at that. Now I need to work out why it doesn't seem to be getting any shares, just a lot of handshake timeouts. I set up the port forward but it doesn't seem to have helped. Do I just need to leave it doing its thing for a while?

[K1773R]

cant you read?

Code:

localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, server error: p2pool is downloading shares

Indeed I can. I am also capable of drawing logical conclusions. Though I've worked with code enough that not much surprises me, "downloading shares" does not particularly imply a causal link to "authorization denied" to me.

If that is the cause though, I'm happy to take it at that. Now I need to work out why it doesn't seem to be getting any shares, just a lot of handshake timeouts. I set up the port forward but it doesn't seem to have helped. Do I just need to leave it doing its thing for a while?

it takes some time until p2pool has pulled the sharechain, check that it has connections.

[Richy_T]

cant you read?

Code:

localhost:9332 04/04/2013 04:56:19, server error: p2pool is downloading shares

Indeed I can. I am also capable of drawing logical conclusions. Though I've worked with code enough that not much surprises me, "downloading shares" does not particularly imply a causal link to "authorization denied" to me.

If that is the cause though, I'm happy to take it at that. Now I need to work out why it doesn't seem to be getting any shares, just a lot of handshake timeouts. I set up the port forward but it doesn't seem to have helped. Do I just need to leave it doing its thing for a while?

it takes some time until p2pool has pulled the sharechain, check that it has connections.

It doesn't look terribly promising. Mostly it looks like it's connecting to three ips and then the handshakes are timing out.

2013-04-04 00:19:28.112000 P2Pool: 0 shares in chain (0 verified/0 total) Peers:
 1 (0 incoming)

Think I'm going to leave it for a while. It's bedtime anyway

[gdsl]

Rotten luck we'r having lately

[Subo1977]

Rotten luck we'r having lately

It's not L*, it's variance

[gdsl]

It's not L*, it's variance

Are you afraid of the word luck ?

[gyverlb]

2013-04-04 00:19:28.112000 P2Pool: 0 shares in chain (0 verified/0 total) Peers:
 1 (0 incoming)

Think I'm going to leave it for a while. It's bedtime anyway

P2Pool should establish outgoing connections right away and you should get incoming connections very slowly. If you don't get any stable established connections just after P2Pool is started, something (a firewall/router) is preventing them to be established.

[PatMan]

It's not L*, it's variance

Are you afraid of the word luck ?

Afraid? They're shit scared of of it! 

Have a scroll back through the threads, you'll see why.

Right, 5 days of nothingness is enough for me - back to another pool to recoup my losses again......

[organofcorti]

Rotten luck we'r having lately

It's not L*, it's variance

Don't use L*, that's silly. Use *uck. None would mistake that for anything else.

[PatMan]

Rotten luck we'r having lately

It's not L*, it's variance

Don't use L*, that's silly. Use *uck. None would mistake that for anything else.

 

[rav3n_pl]

Okay, maybe s1 will put in like 500GH and make few blocks? ;]

[PatMan]

Okay, maybe s1 will put in like 500GH and make few blocks? ;]

I fear that all the teraflops from the planet Avalon won't make any difference. Relying on something that not only is brand new with no track record, but also happens not to work with p2pool seems a tad risky to me. Pointing massive amounts of hashing power at a pool whose code is suspect and expecting problems to magically disappear is just daft.....but I'm just repeating myself again......

In order to fix a problem you have to go to the root cause of it.

[kano]

Okay, maybe s1 will put in like 500GH and make few blocks? ;]

I fear that all the teraflops from the planet Avalon won't make any difference. Relying on something that not only is brand new with no track record, but also happens not to work with p2pool seems a tad risky to me. Pointing massive amounts of hashing power at a pool whose code is suspect and expecting problems to magically disappear is just daft.....but I'm just repeating myself again......

In order to fix a problem you have to go to the root cause of it.

1.5s ...

Edit: remember - each chip in the Avalon is only ~280Mh/s = 15.33s per nonce range
The Avalon divides it up into 10 - so 1.5s per nonce range.

N.B. that 280Mh/s is of course slower per chip than the 2 chips in a BFL FPGA single ... and not all that much faster even than the 200MH/s chips in the ModMinerQuad FPGA (or the 190MH/s chips in the Icarus ...)
There's just lots more (80 per board) and each chip uses a lot less power than an FPGA chip (Avalon ~2.5W per chip, BFL FPGA ~40W per chip, Icarus ~10W per chip)

[Richy_T]

2013-04-04 00:19:28.112000 P2Pool: 0 shares in chain (0 verified/0 total) Peers:
 1 (0 incoming)

Think I'm going to leave it for a while. It's bedtime anyway

P2Pool should establish outgoing connections right away and you should get incoming connections very slowly. If you don't get any stable established connections just after P2Pool is started, something (a firewall/router) is preventing them to be established.

Well, as the guy who administers the firewall, I don't think that's the case . My home network is pretty much straight-through outbound. It looks like some connections are being made but the handshake is failing. I'll take another look tonight.