BitMinter.com * Optional Custom Miner, PPLNS, Merged mining, Newbie-Friendly! *

[P4man]

Did we have some downtime today, I see atleast some of my 3 workers have swapped to a backup pool for some time ?

Not aware of any downtime. but if you are using cgminer, then thats fairly normal. Whenever a LP happens and cgminer thinks its not getting new work fast enough, it will send a few shares to one of your failover pools. I constantly spill like ~2% to failover pools. There is a switch to stop that behavior (--failover-only or something? check the readme), but it doesnt hurt, and in fact, might give you a tiny advantage.

[Isokivi]

Did we have some downtime today, I see atleast some of my 3 workers have swapped to a backup pool for some time ?

Not aware of any downtime. but if you are using cgminer, then thats fairly normal. Whenever a LP happens and cgminer thinks its not getting new work fast enough, it will send a few shares to one of your failover pools. I constantly spill like ~2% to failover pools. There is a switch to stop that behavior (--failover-only or something? check the readme), but it doesnt hurt, and in fact, might give you a tiny advantage.

Ok, cool. Im actually using Bamt on two of my rigs. Looks like 1-2 of them have been in the backup pool for enough time to mine 0.05 bitcoins, also my hashrate at bitminter has gone fairly low for a long period:
Completed     Ghps      Your Ghps     Your score
2012-02-14 19:55   117.657   1.341   1.14%
2012-02-14 18:31   115.866   1.278   1.10%
2012-02-14 17:05   115.665   1.236   1.07%
2012-02-14 15:40   108.477   1.046   0.96%
2012-02-14 14:08   129.409   0.390   0.30%
2012-02-14 12:52   114.638   0.736   0.64%
2012-02-14 11:25   132.733   1.337   1.01%
2012-02-14 10:11   119.273   1.275   1.07%
2012-02-14 08:48   111.668   1.339   1.20%
2012-02-14 07:19   115.947   1.333   1.15%

Btw. Are there any plans on implementing an e-mail warning system for workers going offline ?

[P4man]

That looks worse than spilling over.

As for email and/or SMS alerts; I think its on Docs todo list, as one of the features that will be made available to people donating.
But his list is long, and so dont quote me on that .

That said, doesnt BAMT have a feature for that? That would be more useful, you want to be alerted if your miners are down, more than if only one of your pools is down.

[Isokivi]

That looks worse than spilling over.

As for email and/or SMS alerts; I think its on Docs todo list, as one of the features that will be made available to people donating.
But his list is long, and so dont quote me on that .

That said, doesnt BAMT have a feature for that? That would be more useful, you want to be alerted if your miners are down, more than if only one of your pools is down.

It does, but I cant seem to get it working, atleast with gmails SMTP server, my nearly nonexistent linux-skills could be a factor there tho : )

[DrHaribo]

Did we have some downtime today, I see atleast some of my 3 workers have swapped to a backup pool for some time ?

My own workers had connection problems today 11:57-12:07 UTC and 14:21-14:28 UTC. Looks like that coincides with your drop in stats on BitMinter. I hope that's not how things are going to be with the new data center.

17 minutes shouldn't affect your stats that much though. Perhaps the miner took a while to move back from the backup pool?

Btw. Are there any plans on implementing an e-mail warning system for workers going offline ?

Yep, it's on the famous TODO list.

[Isokivi]

Did we have some downtime today, I see atleast some of my 3 workers have swapped to a backup pool for some time ?

My own workers had connection problems today 11:57-12:07 UTC and 14:21-14:28 UTC. Looks like that coincides with your drop in stats on BitMinter. I hope that's not how things are going to be with the new data center.

17 minutes shouldn't affect your stats that much though. Perhaps the miner took a while to move back from the backup pool?

Btw. Are there any plans on implementing an e-mail warning system for workers going offline ?

Yep, it's on the famous TODO list.

Imho you propably shouldn't bother with a sms-system, who these days does not have e-mail in their pocket and even if thats a considerable amount of ppl, it will be far less in a year.

[P4man]

Imho you propably shouldn't bother with a sms-system, who these days does not have e-mail in their pocket and even if thats a considerable amount of ppl, it will be far less in a year.

I disagree somewhat. I get so many mails per day, I really dont check my phone every time a mail arrives. When an SMS arrives, I do check, even at night.

That said, an API for the miners that some android/iphone app could check and alert you is probably about as good; the current API only supports pool wide data AFAICT

[Isokivi]

Did we have some downtime today, I see atleast some of my 3 workers have swapped to a backup pool for some time ?

My own workers had connection problems today 11:57-12:07 UTC and 14:21-14:28 UTC. Looks like that coincides with your drop in stats on BitMinter. I hope that's not how things are going to be with the new data center.

17 minutes shouldn't affect your stats that much though. Perhaps the miner took a while to move back from the backup pool?

Btw. Are there any plans on implementing an e-mail warning system for workers going offline ?

Yep, it's on the famous TODO list.

Any Bamt-guru available to point out how I could get the workers to check the primary-pools status more frequently, while mining in a secondary pool ^^ ?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Did we have some downtime today, I see atleast some of my 3 workers have swapped to a backup pool for some time ?

My own workers had connection problems today 11:57-12:07 UTC and 14:21-14:28 UTC. Looks like that coincides with your drop in stats on BitMinter. I hope that's not how things are going to be with the new data center.

17 minutes shouldn't affect your stats that much though. Perhaps the miner took a while to move back from the backup pool?

Btw. Are there any plans on implementing an e-mail warning system for workers going offline ?

Yep, it's on the famous TODO list.

Any Bamt-guru available to point out how I could get the workers to check the primary-pools status more frequently, while mining in a secondary pool ^^ ?

Use cgminer.  It is built into BAMT and has pretty quick pool status change detection.

[Isokivi]

Imho you propably shouldn't bother with a sms-system, who these days does not have e-mail in their pocket and even if thats a considerable amount of ppl, it will be far less in a year.

I disagree somewhat. I get so many mails per day, I really dont check my phone every time a mail arrives. When an SMS arrives, I do check, even at night.

That said, an API for the miners that some android/iphone app could check and alert you is probably about as good; the current API only supports pool wide data AFAICT

I'd work around that by setting up a separate e-mail address for the warnings and have it be on vibrate or sound on new mail.

[DrHaribo]

As the hashrate increases the shifts keep getting shorter, is there a better formula that can be used to either keep shifts the same length of time or dynamically adjust the number of shifts that count toward a found block?

Well, there's two things to consider. Higher N is nice because it spreads income out over more shares (proofs of work), so the payout for a share is more stable. But a lower N is also nice because you get all the pay for a given share quickly. I think paying N shares where N is the same as the difficulty is a good balance. Perhaps when the pool is larger we can can go 2 x N.

Currently it takes about 15 hours before work you did is no longer eligible for more pay. And after those 15 hours, if you got a block towards the end of that period, you have to wait another 20 hours for the last block to be confirmed. Worst case you wait 35 hours from doing the work to getting paid. In the future you can donate and not have to wait those 20 hours for confirmation, but your work would still be getting pay for ~15 hours. Probably best not to add to that.

Bump for a great pool with awesome support!

Thanks, Becks

That said, an API for the miners that some android/iphone app could check and alert you is probably about as good; the current API only supports pool wide data AFAICT

Yes, the current web service API is just general pool-wide info.

Here's what I'm thinking about this:

• 1. First implement donations
• 2. Personal miner stats web service, make it a cheap perk you buy with donations. Now you can use one of the third party offerings for detecting idle/dead miners. I may have to contact the authors of some mobile apps etc to get the pool working with them.
• 3. A general message system with events triggering messages and channels delivering them
• 4. Email as the first type of messaging channel
• 5. Idle/dead miner as the first type of message event
• 6. Other channels and events...Block built, payment sent, etc.

[P4man]

If you allow me to play the role of marketing director;  implement the personal json API first (I would guess thats only like 15 minutes of work?). Make it public and free, for now.

Then the smartphone guys can already start implementing it, testing, some miners might start using it and liking it.

Then once you have donations implemented, make the personal api donate-only.

Yeah, you can call it bait and switch, or a free trial period, it does work .

[ZodiacDragon84]

I would be willing to test an Android app for bitminter...lol

[DrHaribo]

Then once you have donations implemented, make the personal api donate-only.

Yeah, you can call it bait and switch, or a free trial period, it does work .

Hmm. It's very dangerous to give people something for free, and then later make it non-free. But yeah, if it is made into a "free during beta test!" kind of thing from the start, it might work.

I think the main issue with making the web service is how to detect that a miner is dead. The current hash rate shown on the web site is very unreliable for slow workers. It can be sometimes 0, sometimes 150. I guess I either have to find a solution for this, or say that this service does not work for slow workers.

[P4man]

I think the main issue with making the web service is how to detect that a miner is dead. The current hash rate shown on the web site is very unreliable for slow workers. It can be sometimes 0, sometimes 150. I guess I either have to find a solution for this, or say that this service does not work for slow workers.

Average it out over a longer time span. Ideally, let the user configure the timespan (you can do this on EMC).
I would actually also like that feature for the current stats. Its now 5 minutes I think? Its a bit short IMO. And sometimes you may want to see average for like 12 hours, sometimes you want to see it for only 5 minutes.
So let the user choose

[scrubadub]

I think the main issue with making the web service is how to detect that a miner is dead. The current hash rate shown on the web site is very unreliable for slow workers. It can be sometimes 0, sometimes 150. I guess I either have to find a solution for this, or say that this service does not work for slow workers.

Average it out over a longer time span. Ideally, let the user configure the timespan (you can do this on EMC).
I would actually also like that feature for the current stats. Its now 5 minutes I think? Its a bit short IMO. And sometimes you may want to see average for like 12 hours, sometimes you want to see it for only 5 minutes.
So let the user choose

Yeah, just showing me a timestamp from when the last proof was submitted would benefit me greatly. Currently if I notice my hashrate seems low i have to check the current proofs and see if they increment a few minutes later.

[Isokivi]

I hope this dosent mean the pool has somehow been deemed hoppable:

Rank    Name    Mhps
1   Fefox           84,345
2   bronan   79,607

..If not, then welcome.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I hope this dosent mean the pool has somehow been deemed hoppable:

Rank    Name    Mhps
1   Fefox           84,345
2   bronan   79,607

..If not, then welcome.

Hoppers need a pool to "fallback" when all prop pools and yielding less than PPS.  The weird thing is Fefox appears to always mine and the amount of hashing power just varies.  That isn't "usual" hopper behavior.

[Isokivi]

I hope this dosent mean the pool has somehow been deemed hoppable:

Rank    Name    Mhps
1   Fefox           84,345
2   bronan   79,607

..If not, then welcome.

Hoppers need a pool to "fallback" when all prop pools and yielding less than PPS.  The weird thing is Fefox appears to always mine and the amount of hashing power just varies.  That isn't "usual" hopper behavior.

Could it be more profitable for a hopper using us as a backup pool to leave a miner or two to keep up the shift-score while hopping out ?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Could it be more profitable for a hopper using us as a backup pool to leave a miner or two to keep up the shift-score while hopping out ?

No.   That is the whole point of PPLNS.  Each share in the 1.3 million prior to the block is worth exactly the same.  Never more, never less.  Now that value will vary depending on our luck (unlike say PPS) but that isn't something which a hopper can know.