[4+ EH] Slush Pool (slushpool.com); Overt AsicBoost; World First Mining Pool

[Mythoranium]

The website says that you need a separate user/pass for every worker. What would happen if one would ignore that?

On the server side, every worker has queue of 12 last jobs (by default), which are needed to verify submitted jobs by worker. If you submit a share, but the job was already deleted on the server (by asking 12 next jobs from server in meantime), the share won't be accepted. So, if you're mining only by CPUs, you probably don't need separate workers, as CPU miners does not need such high number of parallel jobs. But I still recommend to use workers - it is easier to track miner problems and you don't need to investigate how much jobs is your worker asking (it does not need to correspond with number of CPU cores). If you are GPU miner, you should definitely use separate workers to not losing shares.

Thanks, slush! That is exactly what I needed to know!

[slush]

I think there might be an overflow error with the scoring...  Look at the total score in the following vs. the contributed shares and CFD...

Well, this is not a bug, this is feature :-). I didn't want to complicate the stuff with score based system in the introduction, but as you are asking...

Using exp(round_time/C) can lead to extremely high numbers. Such big that with many workers and extremely bad pool luck, it may overflow somewhere. So in reality, the score based system is implemented with one optimization, that was not explained yesterday:

The real formula isnt score += exp(round_time/C), but:

Code:

duration = min(round_time, hour_time)
score += exp(duration/C)

where round_time is count of seconds from round beginning and hour_time is count of seconds in current hour.

And every hour, exactly at 0 minute, 0 second +- 50 miliseconds, I'm performing "renormalization". This means that all worker scores are divided by exp(min(3600, round_time)/C).

This has NO IMPACT on score system itself, but helps handling huge numbers in application. So your observation was absolutely correct, because every hour the system score drop to very low number.

[bobR]

With the last round I may as well quit
the pay out was so low I spent more on electric

penalizing early shares is not the way to go

[slush]

the pay out was so low I spent more on electric
penalizing early shares is not the way to go

...said bobR after three rounds of (probably) bad luck.

(But if you mine using CPU, you are probably right. The electricity cost more than you mine. It is just the nice way how to get your first bitcoins to play with - except Bitcoin Faucet).

[xenon481]

With the last round I may as well quit
the pay out was so low I spent more on electric

penalizing early shares is not the way to go

Did you not look at the metrics and charts that showed that it averaged out over time?


Edit: Thank you very much, Slush. The amount of analysis you did on this was amazing.

[pla]

penalizing early shares is not the way to go

They don't get "penalized" - They have no value at all until the pool solves the block.  The estimated value means just that, an estimate of what you'd get if the pool solved the block immediately afterward.

Without knowing exactly when the pool will next hit, you can't know an accurate value-per-share.  And you can't know exactly when the pool will next hit, sooo...

[slush]

I just added some caching of stats on site, because some people like stats too much that they keep their fingers on "F5" key :-). Graphs and hall of fame are generated every hour, stats page is cached for 30 seconds. Profile page is not cached (yet).

[bobR]

the pay out was so low I spent more on electric
penalizing early shares is not the way to go

...said bobR after three rounds of (probably) bad luck.

(But if you mine using CPU, you are probably right. The electricity cost more than you mine. It is just the nice way how to get your first bitcoins to play with - except Bitcoin Faucet).

maybe it was just luck but     0E-8    pay out sheesh
I don't mind getting a fraction
but thats one step above ZERO

[Ricochet]

I'm having an odd issue.  About once every 2-3 minutes, both of my miners lose the connection to the pool, to reconnect a few seconds later.  I don't think it's my Internet connection because I pinged Google continuously during these periods with no packet loss.  Pinging http://mining.bitcoin.cz at the same time yields a tiny bit of packet loss and extra delay.

Are there bandwidth issues going on or perhaps should I test more diagnostics on my end?  I'm using both m0mchil's GPU miner and ufasoft's SSE2 miner (1 thread) at the same time.

EDIT:  Also, if this keeps happening, does that count as a disconnect for the new scoring system?  In other words, if this happens every 3 minutes, will every share I contribute count as an "early" share?

[theGECK]

Ricochet, I have the same setup as you with the miners, and noticed the same thing. The disconnection only lasts for a few seconds, and the message typically says "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC". It just appeared as I was writing it, so you can use the timestamp on this post to search for any errors or problems, if needed.

[slush]

Yes, the problem is on the server. I'm solving it, hope it will be better in few minutes.

[myrkul]

Is there a point to cpu mining anymore? I thought the idea was to normalize luck over time into a steady trickle.

Now, we're back to luck, since you have to submit your share very close to the solution to get anything.

sadface.

[spacediver]

Greetings everyone miners,
Thanks slush for the great work,

I've too got 0E-8 reward (instead of "none") for once, maybe it should be bugreported hereby.

Yes, lowering estimated reward from f5 to f5 is rather depressing thing to see , though, waiting for my first mined BTcent to be sent, I have a question/suggestion: would it be reasonable to keep all three a) confirmed b) sent c) total reward values in account profile?...

Thanks again.

[slush]

I've too got 0E-8 reward (instead of "none") for once, maybe it should be bugreported hereby.

That's not a real "bug", it is just another notation of "zero" . But you are right, it should display normal number.

[[Tycho]]

I'm crunching at ~800 Mh/s and everything was fine until this update.
Now 9 blocks already found by pool and i'm getting about 50% of my normal reward, i don't think it's just a random fluctiation - my progress rate was perfectly straight for previous two days.
It was ok to make donations mandatory, it was ok to delay stats by 2 hours and hide everything, but taking 50% off is certainly not ok for me. I can't even guess now if someone got those BTCs instead of me, or they go directly to pool's owner

[FairUser]

How many other people saw "None" for their Payments on the following rounds/blocks?

#      Block found                 Duration     Total shares      Your reward        Block #   
1207   2011-02-17 23:46:14   0:00:58   682                   none                   108812   
1206   2011-02-17 23:45:16   0:00:20   178                   none                   108811

I should have at least seen something on the 1207 round...but didn't.  Using a regular miner with a askrate of 5.

[theGECK]

Each block was found by a solitary miner in the pool before any other miners could get their work back to the server. But I would like to find out why this would happen as well - I'm seeing a much wider range between minimum and maximum payout on the blocks that I am a part of, and more blocks solved with no shares. If many of us are seeing this, it probably isn't luck, and it might be an issue with the update and how things are calculated.

[xenon481]

It looks like the lower average block reward is because there are more people solving more blocks more quickly. This should keep your average daily reward the same as before, but your reward from each block will be lower.

Notice that there are almost 900 workers attached when just three days ago there were only ~650 workers attached.

My average block reward has been lower today as well, but this was also my best day for total reward.


Edit:

How many other people saw "None" for their Payments on the following rounds/blocks?

#      Block found                 Duration     Total shares      Your reward        Block #   
1207   2011-02-17 23:46:14   0:00:58   682                   none                   108812   
1206   2011-02-17 23:45:16   0:00:20   178                   none                   108811

I should have at least seen something on the 1207 round...but didn't.  Using a regular miner with a askrate of 5.

I did get a share of 1206 and ended up getting ~0.2575 BTC from it. All that means is that your miner didn't find any shares (solutions at an easier difficulty) within those 20 and 58 seconds that it took to solve those blocks.

[hacim]

How many other people saw "None" for their Payments on the following rounds/blocks?

#      Block found                 Duration     Total shares      Your reward        Block #   
1207   2011-02-17 23:46:14   0:00:58   682                   none                   108812   
1206   2011-02-17 23:45:16   0:00:20   178                   none                   108811

I should have at least seen something on the 1207 round...but didn't.  Using a regular miner with a askrate of 5.

I had the *exact* same number of shares, and duration, but i got a reward:

#      Block found                 Duration     Total shares      Your reward        Block #   
1207   2011-02-17 23:46:14   0:00:58   682   0.20091418   108812    105 confirmations left
1206   2011-02-17 23:45:16   0:00:20   178   0.26010487   108811    104 confirmations left

[zoidial]

While people are on the block 1206 subject....

1206   2011-02-17 23:45:16   0:00:20   178   0.25495445   108811    107 confirmations left

one share's worth:
50 BTC / 178 = 0.28089887

2% of this share (donation):
0.28089887 * 0.02 = 0.00561797

Expected result:
0.28089887 - 0.00561797 = 0.2752809

With the new score-based share system, this means that we were unlucky (although lucky enough to find any share within 20 seconds...) and found a share within the first few seconds of the round (or some of us are donating more than 2%), so our single share was worth less than those who found a share on second 19 or 20 of the round.  I don't think we have access to previous 'score' data, so there's no way to really verify how that math worked.