Slush Pool Outage

[sunriselad]

Hi there
I am a reasonably new miner to Slush's pool and want to post some possible anomalies I have found after the recent outage in the relevant forum but am restricted to this section.

Can anyone offer assistance with being able to post in the slush's pool thread.

Many thanks

[genpayne]

Why not post them here? Then hopefully someone will copy them across.

For me it looks like everything's as should be. Have you read the full thread / up to date on what happened?

[sunriselad]

Thanks, I wasn't sure I would be told its the wrong place.

My issue is with my rewards for the shares, before the outage they roughly followed:

(25-0.5 * My Shares) / Total Shares From Block.

Here are my latest:  they seem way under.

#   Block found at   Duration   Total shares   Your shares   Your BTC reward   Block #   Block value   Validity
17683   2013-04-25 18:06:03   0:35:53   3819937   794   0.00124563   233109   25.45165437    85 confirmations left
17682   2013-04-25 17:30:10   5:15:03   32470080   15383   0.00859605   233105   25.26860000    81 confirmations left
17681   2013-04-25 12:15:07   0:46:37   4629094   2388   0.01508919   233065   25.29600000    41 confirmations left
17680   2013-04-25 11:28:30   0:57:54   5689208   2550   0.01025923   233057   25.21487399    33 confirmations left
17679   2013-04-25 10:30:36   5:37:06   23468644   7472   0.00788146   233049   25.25990000    25 confirmations left

Have I missed something and this is correct or could there be an issue?

Cheers

[genpayne]

The key fields are block value, your shares and the total.

Code:

3819937     794      0.00124563     25.45165437    
32470080   15383  0.00859605     25.26860000
4629094     2388   0.01508919     25.29600000    
5689208      2550   0.01025923     25.21487399    
23468644    7472   0.00788146     25.25990000

Now the basic formula is (Block Value * 0.98 * your shares) / total shares. The .98 is because Slush takes 2% for his costs / time / managerial fee

So you're theoretical earnings are for each block
0.005184494    -0.0039388642
0.011731808    -0.0031357578
0.012788401    +0.0023007888
0.011075702    -0.0008164716
0.007881458    ~0

Total = 0.0486618628
Leaving you -0.0055903028

This could be a fault. I expect however its down to the true formula being a little more complex. Older shares are worth less to discourage attempts to cheat the system. Its probably just coincidence with the crash and you're mining rates were fastest at the start of blocks.
Im sure you've noticed the hash rate fluctuates a little bit. Not to mention, if you started / stopped the miners at all then bad timing could leave you with earlier less worthy shares.

If you are still concerned let me know, i'm about to get out of newbie mode so can put a copy of this in the slush's pool thread.

[big6willy9]

Yeah actually i was at about .051 total rewards before the outage and after mining throughout i logged on today to find i had less than .05 in my total rewards with no payout. Now i am back to about .052 but still should be higher after a couple days of mining

[Lucko]

3 things you need to know.

1. Slush pool is using Slush method... It is not simple (Block Value * 0.98 * your shares) / total shares. It is more complex do discourage pool hoping... But basicly shares at the end of a block are more valuable then one at the start. Longer the run bigger the difference. And you get penalised if you stop miner...
2. You will get less on short runs do to pool hoppers(when they take away from you) and more on longer runs(when you take away from them).
3. Forget mining calculator, this only works on long time frame

From what I can see there are some shares missing(you were under normal speed) in all the blocks you are underpaid so I guess you were offline or something like that...

[rsbriggs]

I have a problem with a couple blocks. I have similar numbers in the two blocks (differ by about 30%), and they are roughly the same duration, but the payouts differ by more than an order of magnitude...

17685   2013-04-25 20:48:03   0:39:46   4255356   155   0.00095736    233130
17681   2013-04-25 12:15:07   0:46:37   4629094   109   0.00009101    233065

[white854]

Any idea how long it will take to get my pending payout from the outage, I had to take my miners down for a while because of the outage and it wouldnt let me connect back up, but now i have items that i am not getting. They are still sitting in pending and from what i have been reading is that people are already getting their backlog of blocks found.

[Lucko]

I have a problem with a couple blocks. I have similar numbers in the two blocks (differ by about 30%), and they are roughly the same duration, but the payouts differ by more than an order of magnitude...

17685   2013-04-25 20:48:03   0:39:46   4255356   155   0.00095736    233130
17681   2013-04-25 12:15:07   0:46:37   4629094   109   0.00009101    233065

No they are not the same... On a longer block you have 30% less shares so you probably stooped your miner... That is why you have much less...

[Lucko]

Any idea how long it will take to get my pending payout from the outage, I had to take my miners down for a while because of the outage and it wouldnt let me connect back up, but now i have items that i am not getting. They are still sitting in pending and from what i have been reading is that people are already getting their backlog of blocks found.

OK, I went thru all reportings of wrong block rewards. I fixed some rounds, but currently it looks to me that they're fine and reported differences are in the range of common variance (+ some downtime during the pool recovery). So I'm going to process pending block rewards and payouts in few minutes.

Automatic payouts will be still disabled until tomorrow and I'll do manual payouts irregularly by myself, because I want to keep eyes to payout mechanism for some time. But if everything will work well, I'll enable periodic payouts every 15 minutes tomorrow.

[rsbriggs]

Actually, the other way around I think.   I started the miner during that block.  No matter, I now understand that the payout isn't linear....

[white854]

Any idea how long it will take to get my pending payout from the outage, I had to take my miners down for a while because of the outage and it wouldnt let me connect back up, but now i have items that i am not getting. They are still sitting in pending and from what i have been reading is that people are already getting their backlog of blocks found.

OK, I went thru all reportings of wrong block rewards. I fixed some rounds, but currently it looks to me that they're fine and reported differences are in the range of common variance (+ some downtime during the pool recovery). So I'm going to process pending block rewards and payouts in few minutes.

Automatic payouts will be still disabled until tomorrow and I'll do manual payouts irregularly by myself, because I want to keep eyes to payout mechanism for some time. But if everything will work well, I'll enable periodic payouts every 15 minutes tomorrow.

Thanks, I guess i must have passed right over that message. I will take a look tomorrow and see what happens.

[Lucko]

Actually, the other way around I think.   I started the miner during that block.  No matter, I now understand that the payout isn't linear....

It is not simple but if you are interested

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg50002#msg50002

[rassalas]

I did notice that the luck for the day dropped significantly.  Any simple explanation for that?

[Lucko]

I did notice that the luck for the day dropped significantly.  Any simple explanation for that?

Yes bed luck... Sometimes you get more sometimes you get less. Unless you are on a PPS pool this is a way of things...

[rassalas]

I was wondering if it had anything to do with the page being down,  It seems although I made a lot of unconfirmed, running blind yesterday,  none of them have been confirmed yet which I would expect confirmation on about half of them by now.   Wondering if the pool running without the webpage was somehow handicapped.

[minerapia]

Unconfirmed rewards will be sorted soon(tm) when slush gets into it. He has to test and enable systems one by one to make sure things go right.

[sunriselad]

Ahhh great.

I now understand, thanks to everyone who helped.

I also have 2 quick questions about solo mining if anyone can help to clarify for me:

1) Does stopping and restarting the miner (CGMiner) have any effect on things? (I have written a scheduler to restart at different intensities)
2) To use multiple machines for solo mining do you point them all at the same rpcuser?

That's it cheers for all the help.

[genpayne]

1) Does stopping and restarting the miner (CGMiner) have any effect on things? (I have written a scheduler to restart at different intensities)
Due to the way older shares are worth less, if you are unlucky and tend to run more when blocks are starting you will earn less.
But long term it shouldn't really matter. Everything should average out!

2) To use multiple machines for solo mining do you point them all at the same rpcuser?
RPCUser? You mean the user on slush? ie worker accounts?
If so I just added a couple of extra workers (and this was for different clients on the same machine). But i think it still works if you point them all at one.

[sunriselad]

Sorry I'm not sure what the correct terminology is but I mean mining to my own own instance of "bitcoin-qt -server" i.e. not connected to a pool.
I thought it was solo mining.

rpcuser is the account user you set in the bitcoin.conf.