Lots of network issues with several Vertcoin pools [solved] [nope, not solved]

[MagicSmoker]

I seem to be getting a lot of "Stratum_recv_line failed" errors and outright disconnects from the pool with both Vertminer and CCMiner-x64, and this is happening on several different pools. Since I am getting a slightly better hashrate with Vertminer I am using it for now, and the only command line switches I am using (besides the necessary ones to specify url:port and address) are "-D" for debug mode and "-r 3" to limit the number of retries in the event of failure.

I am trying to stick to Network 2 where possible since I am using my existing hardware to just try this mining stuff out and it isn't exactly ideal for the task (a GTX 1050 Ti) but at least when mining Ubiq for 1 week I received a little over 2.5 coins; at the rate things are going with VTC I can expect 1 coin in 2 weeks, maybe.

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[JohnnyDoeTheSecond]

There are several issues:
Number one: pool operators want to hog all the money to themselves. Notice how miningpoolhub.com has exact instructions to mine every other coin, except vertcoin, which just refers you to some forum somewhere, but the hyperlink just loops back to the exact same page.



Number 2: the software is loaded with scammers. Every single brand of software I've used only mines for the writer of the software or it locks up if you enter your own VTC or BTC address.

Number 3: Anyone who is mining it wants it all to themselves, so they sure aren't going to help YOU out. They will intentionally publish non-functioning software that scams all the money to themselves. This is why actual, functioning software is hard to find.

So, there is a war on between the scum and the honest people, as usual, and when you call them on it, you can get accused of overreacting.

I talked to one dev via email, and I asked him to show me (Awesome Miner) how to make his software actually WORK. On various Youtube videos, it was a few clicks, choose a pool, bam, done.

After endless hours of trying everything, I talked to the dev, and he said a new version was coming out "in fifteen minutes."

Sure.

There is a war on against YOU mining with the profitable Lyra2REV2 algo.

[newmz]

I recommend using the Nanashi ccminer v2.2-mod-r2 which is modded specifically for Lyra2RE2. I think it was modded by and for monacoin miners. You can get it here:

https://github.com/Nanashi-Meiyo-Meijin/ccminer/releases

I have been using it with 5 x 1060s, 4 x 1070s and 1 x 1080 on my own vertcoin P2Pool node and i'm getting 345-350mh/s with all GPUs core +120, mem -500, powerlimit 105%. Setting the powerlimit high means  it's using a lot of watts, but the reported hash-rate is actually agreeing with the pools I have tried (best results using my own P2Pool-vertcoin node, which is actually pretty easy to set up).

I have had it mining stable for many consecutive days, to my own vertcoin-qt wallet which has the payout address set in the P2Pool node. I have also used it to mine at the miningpoolhub.com Lyra2RE2 coin switching port (swapping between vertcoin and monacoin) and although it doesn't report hash-rate as high as P2Pool, it's pretty close and still stable.

My experience with this ccminer has been fine - it happily accepts my VTC wallet address after -u and doesn't scam me or crash. 

[MagicSmoker]

I don't think either ccminer or vertminer are scamming* me, per se; they both accepted my vertcoin address, received work from the pool and submitted solutions that were accepted (though quite a few were marked stale or "boooo"). The main problem I am concerned about here is with poor network connectivity and so far I've experienced such with every single pool.

As I am just starting with mining I am concentrating on reasonably profitable coins with a low payout threshold so I don't have to wait too long to find out the software isn't working right or my coins are going to the wrong address, etc. I am specifically avoiding the most profitable coins, however, so I don't run into massive difficulty spikes from, e.g., Nicehash miners (though I guess that's not so much of an issue now that they got hacked).

* - that said, the first pool that I seemed to have the most network reliability with - though still not 100% - was poolmining.org, however after totaling up some 3000+ shares I noticed no pending balance and checked the support section where, lo-n-behold, a bunch of other people were complaining about the same thing. Finally one of the admins admitted that there was a problem with the payment processor and, so sorry, any work from the last 12 hours is gone. Gone for you, maybe, but not them, I suspect.

[m1n1ngP4d4w4n]

I used to use the meijin modded ccminer, but nowadays i use excavator for lyra2rev2, it's faster on my setup by about 15%, give it a try, i'll be interested to see if other people see the improvements like me.

Cheers.

[MagicSmoker]

Yeah, I'll definitely be trying different miners out after the network connectivity issue is sorted out.

I probably should have mentioned that I had the occasional "stratum port disconnected" error when mining Ubiq to Pool Sexy, but no full-blown disconnects. I stopped mining Ubiq temporarily because the difficulty spiked to 25 from 15 (!!!) and I wanted to try other coins/algorithms out. Vertcoin was my second choice but since that hasn't worked too well I am now crunching away on Zcash at nanopool (I am also trying different pools as well as coins at this point).

[P00P135]

Yeah, I'll definitely be trying different miners out after the network connectivity issue is sorted out.

I probably should have mentioned that I had the occasional "stratum port disconnected" error when mining Ubiq to Pool Sexy, but no full-blown disconnects. I stopped mining Ubiq temporarily because the difficulty spiked to 25 from 15 (!!!) and I wanted to try other coins/algorithms out. Vertcoin was my second choice but since that hasn't worked too well I am now crunching away on Zcash at nanopool (I am also trying different pools as well as coins at this point).

Might just be your internet.

[MagicSmoker]

Might just be your internet.

That's unlikely. I have a newish cable modem, a decent router (using hard-wired ethernet, not Wi-Fi), and while mining Zcash on Nanopool for the last 4 hours or so I haven't experienced any connectivity issues and only one rejected share (out of 131 and counting... lol).

I always ping a pool before I connect to it and all the Vertcoin pools came in under 60ms, but I still experienced several dropouts every minute and unrecoverable disconnects (that is, the miner reached the 3 time retry limit I set and I couldn't reconnect to the same pool for several minutes). In contrast, the UBQ pool on Pool Sexy had a ping of about 140ms and while I did receive the occasional stratum warning or temporary disconnect from ethminer 0.12.0, I didn't experience any unrecoverable disconnects; that is, ethminer was able to automatically reconnect and resume operation.

I just find this curious and want to know if others are experiencing the same issues, or if they have found a reliable US pool for small miners (which I am given to understand is "Network 2").

[m1n1ngP4d4w4n]

Might just be your internet.

That's unlikely. I have a newish cable modem, a decent router (using hard-wired ethernet, not Wi-Fi), and while mining Zcash on Nanopool for the last 4 hours or so I haven't experienced any connectivity issues and only one rejected share (out of 131 and counting... lol).

I always ping a pool before I connect to it and all the Vertcoin pools came in under 60ms, but I still experienced several dropouts every minute and unrecoverable disconnects (that is, the miner reached the 3 time retry limit I set and I couldn't reconnect to the same pool for several minutes). In contrast, the UBQ pool on Pool Sexy had a ping of about 140ms and while I did receive the occasional stratum warning or temporary disconnect from ethminer 0.12.0, I didn't experience any unrecoverable disconnects; that is, ethminer was able to automatically reconnect and resume operation.

I just find this curious and want to know if others are experiencing the same issues, or if they have found a reliable US pool for small miners (which I am given to understand is "Network 2").

What i meant was that you could have pools that enforce newer stratum protocol and that older miner don't connect to them properly, so i was kinda suggesting you to try a new one, i've been mining this algo/coin for alot of time without experiencing any issues.

Which pool are you using ? Do you have the same issue with give me coin pool ? (that's the one i use)

[MagicSmoker]

What i meant was that you could have pools that enforce newer stratum protocol and that older miner don't connect to them properly, so i was kinda suggesting you to try a new one, i've been mining this algo/coin for alot of time without experiencing any issues.

Ahh, ok. Well, I d/l'ed the latest versions of both Vertminer and the tpruvot ccminer directly from their respective Github releases page and had the same connectivity issues with both programs.

Which pool are you using ? Do you have the same issue with give me coin pool ? (that's the one i use)

I didn't try the "givemecoins" pool but I just checked it out and it certainly looks a lot less clunky than the ones I have tried. I was also considering giving the pool by the guy that publishes the Son of a Tech videos a try.

The pools I have tried so far and which had connectivity and other issues were:

vtc-poolmining - worked the best with nearly 16 hours of continuous uptime, but then I got booted off and couldn't reconnect for >5 minutes. During that time I poked around on their support forum and found out that no one was getting credit for the last 12 hours of shares they submitted so I decided not to waste any more time with them.

vtc.alwayshashing.com - relentless connectivity issues; in fact, can't even bring their static monitoring page up right as I type this.

Webster, US p2p - 67.253.140.201:9181 - the "least worst" p2p pool, but over 50% of the time the miner software was reporting that GPU #0 was waiting for work, and then when it finally did receive work it was marked stale when submitted over 50% of the time... so, my already slow card was running at 25% of its mining speed, effectively.

Montreal, Canada - 66.70.178.185:9171 - the first and worst p2p pool I tried before I better understood that I should be on Network 2 (port 9181 for most sites, I gather?). Relentless and random disconnects; would run for up to an hour before booting me off and miner couldn't connect with the 3 retry limit and 60 seconds between tries (so at least 3 minutes of downtime) and around 20-25% of my shares were being marked stale. This would have been the least-worst p2p pool /if/ it weren't for the disconnects; at least the Webster pool let me stay connected for the entire time I was evaluating it.

[m1n1ngP4d4w4n]

Alright, well then try GMC, hope it far better for you 

[MagicSmoker]

I hate to ask this sort of thing as I've been using computers since the bad old days of DOS 4.01, but could you provide your command string for excavator to work with give-me-coins? I just d/l'ed Excavator 1.3.7 Alpha and it seems like a hot mess compared to vertminer or ccminer, but I wasn't able to connect to give-me-coins with the latter 2 programs, either, after only changing the url:port in the command string for both programs.

EDIT - here is my ccminer-x64 command string:

ccminer-x64 -D -r 3 -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -O wallet.worker1

I have Debug mode turned on and max retries set to 3 so it doesn't endlessly loop when something fails. Wallet and worker name are fake, of course. Not sure it is a security risk to post actual values here, but, well... I'm paranoid.

[m1n1ngP4d4w4n]

I hate to ask this sort of thing as I've been using computers since the bad old days of DOS 4.01, but could you provide your command string for excavator to work with give-me-coins? I just d/l'ed Excavator 1.3.7 Alpha and it seems like a hot mess compared to vertminer or ccminer, but I wasn't able to connect to give-me-coins with the latter 2 programs, either, after only changing the url:port in the command string for both programs.

EDIT - here is my ccminer-x64 command string:

ccminer-x64 -D -r 3 -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -O wallet.worker1

I have Debug mode turned on and max retries set to 3 so it doesn't endlessly loop when something fails. Wallet and worker name are fake, of course. Not sure it is a security risk to post actual values here, but, well... I'm paranoid.

Look @ the last pages of excavator topic, i give out configuration example for lyra2v2, you should be able to figure it out for gmc 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1777827.msg25663169#msg25663169

[MagicSmoker]

Look @ the last pages of excavator topic, i give out configuration example for lyra2v2, you should be able to figure it out for gmc 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1777827.msg25663169#msg25663169

Well, first I needed to figure out how to correctly configure the switches on a typical command-line miner to work with GMC (aka give-me-coins). Yes, I did /attempt/ to RTFM on GMC's support section, but every time I clicked on "Miner configs" I just got a reload of the top level category descriptions; no actual miner configs, that is.

Through sheer cussed persistence I figured out that you don't specify your wallet address in the command-line switches, rather, you specify your login name (e.g. - MagicSmoker) and your default first worker is named "1". So now my command line for vertminer* looks like:

vertminer -D -r 3 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -u MagicSmoker.1 -p <password>

Hopefully this will help others that want to use give-me-coins a try because I really like the UI - it's my favorite of all the pools I've tried so far, in fact - and it seems to be accepting most of my shares (rather than discarding >80% of them as stale).


* - I believe vertminer is the actual miner used in One Click Miner,

[MagicSmoker]

After 12 hours of running at 14.8MH/s average I've managed to accumulate a whopping 0.0015 VTC on give-me-coins vs. an estimate of 0.0727, or about 48x less than expected... Ping time is 16ms so that clearly isn't the issue, and this dismal track record applies with two different miners.

So far every single Vertcoin pool I've tried is not reflecting my contribution at anywhere close to what my miner should be producing. I will try one last pool - Son of a Tech's - and then I am done with mining VTC.

[sil2222]

After 12 hours of running at 14.8MH/s average I've managed to accumulate a whopping 0.0015 VTC on give-me-coins vs. an estimate of 0.0727, or about 48x less than expected... Ping time is 16ms so that clearly isn't the issue, and this dismal track record applies with two different miners.

So far every single Vertcoin pool I've tried is not reflecting my contribution at anywhere close to what my miner should be producing. I will try one last pool - Son of a Tech's - and then I am done with mining VTC.

As of 12/12/2017 Vert coin has halved their rewards so you should be seeing 50 % less coin payout if you where getting 4 coins now payout is 2 coins. .

[MagicSmoker]

As of 12/12/2017 Vert coin has halved their rewards so you should be seeing 50 % less coin payout if you where getting 4 coins now payout is 2 coins. .

Yep, but difficulty seems to have dropped, too. Not quite in half, so it still takes more time to mine a coin at a given hashrate than prior to yesterday, but in my case I am getting credit for something like 1/50th what I should. I just switched over to multipool.sonofatech.com (after seeing some of his videos on YouTube) so I'll update this thread after I've been mining long enough for a balance to show. Based on whattomine.com I should accumulate VTC at a rate of about 0.00737/hour and I switched over exactly at 8:00AM.

[KTS4GR]

noticed this with vert as well, tried a few pools that were supposedly good and they all had issues.  went back to what I was mining previously that was recognizing every drop of hash power out of my rigs, ESTIMATED profits a little lower, but honestly with network errors, bad pools, down time, etc I bet it's the same if not better. was done with vert after a few hours of messing around.

[MagicSmoker]

noticed this with vert as well, tried a few pools that were supposedly good and they all had issues...

Okay, so I'm not imagining it! That's both good and bad to know...

I agree that the rewards for VTC aren't particularly compelling right now, but my current (and evolving) philosophy is to mine coins that are in the middle of the pack on whattomine.com and sell those I've previously mined/accumulated that are closer to the top. Or to put it another way, mine while network difficult is average; sell when network difficulty is high.

At any rate, the VTC multipool at Son of a Tech seems to be operating much more fairly than any other I've tried, but the long interval between found blocks is making it difficult to evaluate. At least I seem to be getting credit for the vast majority of shares I've submitted (3400 out of 3402, if I understand the text output from Vertminer correctly); at pretty much every other pool 25-50% of my shares were marked stale and tossed out and/or I had lots of connection issues. The former issue may be a case of pools (possibly intentionally) mining identical blocks while the latter is what you might expect if some kid decides to set up a p2p pool in his dorm room or the like.

[MagicSmoker]

Okay, I've been mining to the VTC pool at multipool.sonofatech.com for 45 hours with very few rejected shares (99.8% acceptance) and my earnings are finally approaching the predicted amount. It's still underestimated, but now the difference is between 0.26 reported vs. 0.34 predicted, rather than 0.003 reported vs. 0.17 predicted... I suspect the long time to find a block at SOAT - around 12 to 16 hours - is partially to blame for the under-reported earnings, and if so, then the estimation should improve the longer I mine there. As a result, I am going to give it another day at least, even though I was planning on switching the mighty GTX 1050 Ti over to mining ZEN this morning.

The situation at give-me-coins.com is even worse: the time between blocks is estimated at 105 hours!?! So while I no longer think there are shenanigans going on at GMC, I also don't want to waste time mining there; 12-16 hours between blocks is already trying my patience as it is.