[1050 TH] BitMinter.com [1% PPLNS,Pays TxFees +MergedMining,Stratum,GBT,vardiff]

[mdude77]

Is merged mining still occurring with stratum?

I know other pools have dropped namecoin with stratum (btcguild and ozcoin for example).

M

[DrHaribo]

Apologies for the bumpy ride.

Technical mumblings: There was an issue with longpoll (both getwork and gbt) because of a race condition. Seems it never triggered before I switched to a different java virtual machine. And of course it never triggered during testing, even with that JVM. Have to love those bugs that only occur in production.

I believe that issue should now be resolved.

Bad news is, I didn't know bfgminer requires mining.get_transactions to be implemented. Edit: it doesn't, actually.

So bfgminer is still acting up. But any miners running getwork or gbt should be fine again.

Working on the bfgminer issue.

Is merged mining still occurring with stratum?

Yes, merged mining happens whether you use stratum, gbt or getwork.

[mdude77]

Is merged mining still occurring with stratum?

Yes, merged mining happens whether you use stratum, gbt or getwork.

Great!  Gives you an edge over other pools.

M

[mining4fun11]

Looks like bfgminer isn't working with bitminter anymore.

[kidgorgeous]

BFGminer also not working on my RPi + 2 BFL singles :-/

[DrHaribo]

Issue with bfgminer fixed as well.

[hashking]

Looks like bfgminer now is working onstratum.  I see less shares acceptedon  my console but the hashrate on bitminter looks right.  Is this the way its supposed to work. 

[DrHaribo]

Looks like bfgminer now is working onstratum.  I see less shares acceptedon  my console but the hashrate on bitminter looks right.  Is this the way its supposed to work. 

Yeah, that's because of variable difficulty. When it says "Accepted f7564e7c Diff 16/4 GPU 0" that means this proof of work would be good enough when mining even at difficulty 16, but you are currently mining at difficulty 4. On the server this will count the same as 4 difficulty 1 proofs of work. So you will see the accepted count on the server go up by 4.

[lumberjack]

Sorry for the web server barely being able to move. There's a DDoS attack in progress.

Have you considered something like CloudFlare to help protect the front end? It won't do anything for the mining ports, but it might help defend the website.

Just a thought. I mention CloudFlare specifically because it's free. $$

[DrHaribo]

Have you considered something like CloudFlare to help protect the front end? It won't do anything for the mining ports, but it might help defend the website.

In this instance it was a pool server bug undetected in testing that made the getwork miners go nuts. But yeah, I have considered CloudFlare. I may go for that in the future with more servers.

[Luuzer]

any plans on making fastest user list longer?

when I joined, the pool was 200ghash and I was ~2,5ghash and made it to top 25 that time, now pool is 10x faster and I'm only 2x faster and cant even fit to top 50

[DrHaribo]

any plans on making fastest user list longer?

There are no plans for that. And I think top 50 is as much as makes sense to display at one time.

But perhaps it could have multiple pages, like the block list.

[hahahafr]

https://bitminter.com/block/btc/0000000000000467e7479e1e2566551f1fb803a8df29ab74ddcd71868de3371d

Last block mined has 0 TX in. Something might be wrong.

[DrHaribo]

Last block mined has 0 TX in. Something might be wrong.

Just some miners still on ancient cgminer versions. Those blocks are already rare and will be rarer as more people upgrade their miners. I send a message to upgrade whenever those miners get a reject, but I guess most miners aren't watching their logs that much.

[lenny_]

Last block mined has 0 TX in. Something might be wrong.

Just some miners still on ancient cgminer versions. Those blocks are already rare and will be rarer as more people upgrade their miners. I send a message to upgrade whenever those miners get a reject, but I guess most miners aren't watching their logs that much.

Can you explain it, please? What is so wrong with old versions?

Code:

BTC block at height 210874
Minted by: dynasty

That's mean dynasty have old, obsolete cgminer version and that's why we generated empty, useless block?

[DrHaribo]

Can you explain it, please? What is so wrong with old versions?

Old cgminer/bfgminer have a bug that suddenly make them request work from the server over and over as fast as they can. This amounts to a DDoS attack which can be quite heavy for the server. Giving those miners work that is as cheap as possible to produce is one of the many changes I made to keep things running smoothly even with those miners sometimes going nuts.

That's mean dynasty have old, obsolete cgminer version and that's why we generated empty, useless block?

Maybe. Long poll is also feeding miners empty blocks, so that could also be the reason. But those are not allowed to rollntime, so we are talking a very small amount of work. The chance to produce a block from this is very low.

Why use empty blocks for long poll? Because you can produce this work already before the block change. This way all miners are informed of the block change very quickly, which results in less rejected work.

[mdude77]

Maybe. Long poll is also feeding miners empty blocks, so that could also be the reason. But those are not allowed to rollntime, so we are talking a very small amount of work. The chance to produce a block from this is very low.

Why use empty blocks for long poll? Because you can produce this work already before the block change. This way all miners are informed of the block change very quickly, which results in less rejected work.

I was thinking, why aren't pool operators announcing LP is being retired and force ppl to upgrade?  Even GBT is better than LP.

M

[DrHaribo]

I was thinking, why aren't pool operators announcing LP is being retired and force ppl to upgrade?  Even GBT is better than LP.

The protocol is getwork. Both GBT and getwork use long polling (LP) to detect block changes. With getwork the server has to generate work for the miners, while with GBT or Stratum the miners generate their own work. Long polling is much faster for getwork miners if you can generate the work beforehand, which is possible with empty blocks. With a few tricks like that, plus var diff and rollntime, getwork is still useable, even for ASICs. I'm not saying it's the best choice, though.

[kano]

I was thinking, why aren't pool operators announcing LP is being retired and force ppl to upgrade?  Even GBT is better than LP.

The protocol is getwork. Both GBT and getwork use long polling (LP) to detect block changes. With getwork the server has to generate work for the miners, while with GBT or Stratum the miners generate their own work. Long polling is much faster for getwork miners if you can generate the work beforehand, which is possible with empty blocks. With a few tricks like that, plus var diff and rollntime, getwork is still useable, even for ASICs. I'm not saying it's the best choice, though.

Actually, unless every pool that has been using LP since the beginning has been unable to support LP without sending out empty blocks, there is no excuse.

[DrHaribo]

Actually, unless every pool that has been using LP since the beginning has been unable to support LP without sending out empty blocks, there is no excuse.

Faster long poll means less rejected work and fewer stale/orphan blocks, that's why.