CPU Mining with the best of them

[DJDD]

So thanks to the market flash crash the other day Bitcoin has fallen back into my radar. I started reaeding about Mining and it just sounds plain FUN haha, so I'm going to give it a crack. I did almost an all-nighter the other night just reading (And downloading Bitcoin blocks  ). I fully understand that GPUs run giant parallel circles around CPUs, but it just so happens that I have a whole bunch of quad-core Xeons available at no cost to me, and they're doing nothing right now.
I'm going to drop Unbuntu on them and run a CPU miner and see how it all pans out. A couple of questions:
1. I'll probably have about 10 workers. Should I start my own private pool server to better ditribute the load instead of solo mining on all the machines?
2. Obviously parallelism is key here. I wonder, should I run at least 1 worker per core? Or more? Has anyone done any CPU efficiency tests on this?

Software:
Pool: pushpoold + frontend
Miner: CPUMiner/Minerd

3. Its been a bit hard finding info on what software combo is best to run since CPU mining has largely fallen away, but does the above sound good? Just wondering what the best is.

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[grue]

if you pay for electricity, don't bother.

[Yatta99]

You would probably be better off using ufasoft_bitcoin-miner than minerd. On my core 2 duo the ufasoft gave me about a 2.5x greater hash rate (990kH/s boosted to 2.6MH/s per core). Try both and see what works best for you 

[BinaryMage]

Okay, answers to your questions:

1. Use GUIMiner with Ufasoft's SSE2 CPU miner, get it here.

2. Solo mining will get you nowhere. You'll need to mine in a pool, like Deepbit.

3. As for parallelism, I would just run one worker per computer, Ufasoft's miner scales nicely on multiple cores.

[DJDD]

From everything I've read thus far, pool mining isn't always the best way. It sounds like if you can attain a certain amount of mHashes/s (5000?), that would be good enough for solo/private pooling. Is this a correct assumption?

[BinaryMage]

From everything I've read thus far, pool mining isn't always the best way. It sounds like if you can attain a certain amount of mHashes/s (5000?), that would be good enough for solo/private pooling. Is this a correct assumption?

Well, it depends how much variance you can tolerate. When solo mining, you might solve the block in twenty minutes, or you might solve it in two years.

[Gabi]

Okay, answers to your questions:

1. Use GUIMiner with Ufasoft's SSE2 CPU miner, get it here.

2. Solo mining will get you nowhere. You'll need to mine in a pool, like Deepbit.

3. As for parallelism, I would just run one worker per computer, Ufasoft's miner scales nicely on multiple cores.

I quote him

From everything I've read thus far, pool mining isn't always the best way. It sounds like if you can attain a certain amount of mHashes/s (5000?), that would be good enough for solo/private pooling. Is this a correct assumption?

Well it's more like, if you really have a LOT of hashing power then there is not a big difference but being in a pool don't give you disadvantages, except a fee if you join a pool with a fee

[Bastet]

Got 54MH/s on dual Xeon 7350s (16 theads) on one machine which was better than an ATI 4xxx I had which only did 11MH/s.

[Limb]

Mind sending me one of those xeons? I could use a nice home server haha 

[fascistmuffin]

... but it just so happens that I have a whole bunch of quad-core Xeons available at no cost to me, and they're doing nothing right now...

Sounds like someone else really wants to get fired for using their work's equipment for bitcoin mining.

[scooterking]

Got 54MH/s on dual Xeon 7350s (16 theads) on one machine which was better than an ATI 4xxx I had which only did 11MH/s.

Tell me how you did that?  very eager to know!!

Thanks!