Network usage and 3G access of mining rigs.

[Striker]

Hi,


I would like to know how much bandwidth a system with 5 Quad 6990 would use.
I plan to have the system deployed in a location where only 3G access is possible.

The bandwidth I have is:

Option 1:

1Mbps download 384Kps upload

Option 2:

1Mbps download 384Kps upload


Option 3:

4Mbps download 640Kps upload


Is this enough for a set of 5 mining rigs each with 4 X 6990 ?

Regards.
 

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[makomk]

Bitcoin doesn't use that much bandwidth so I don't think that'll be a problem... but the latency of 3G is probably going to drive your stales up a fair bit. 3G latency can easily reach several seconds, and I think people may have even seen packet latencies of over a minute on occasion...

[Striker]

Hi,


That is really not good.
I think that can happen because of crowded 3G spots ...
Anyway a figure for the bandwidth usage would be cool ...


Regards.

[koin]

those speeds are probably fine.

also keep in mind that most carriers got rid of their unlimited plans, or they throttle the rate to a lower level after you hit a certain threshold.
 
probably safe estimating that you'll see about 10mb down and 5mb up per day, per rig.    i.e., 3g probably won't work for you.

[Ricochet]

Agreed, Bitcoin mining uses very little bandwidth overall.  Even kilobits-per-second would be fine.  What you should be more concerned with is the ping time, AKA network latency.  The higher the latency, the higher the chance that the block you "found" will have already been discovered by someone else in the time it takes to propagate through the network.

EDIT:  For "3G" at least on the USA's AT&T network, I've never had much worse than 1-second ping times.  "EDGE" service had closer to 3-second ping times.  Or in gamer terms, World of Warcraft was laggy but playable on 3G, but completely unplayable on EDGE. 

[Striker]

HI,

Thanks a lot for all your answers!

Ok, some more info.

All of those options have indeed limitless Time and Data use, but they all cut bandwidth after a data limit.

Option 1: After 1GB download speed =  128 Kbps
Option 2: After 2GB download speed =  128 Kbps
Option 3: After 4GB download speed =  128 Kbps

That sucks!
They do not even speak about upload speeds after the data limit.

I imagine it will be also 128Kpbs.

The operator is Vodafone.
Anyway they have a more interesting plan with:


Option 4:

7.2 Mbps download, 1.4Mbps Upload No Data Limits !


Regards.

[Striker]

Hi,

those speeds are probably fine.

also keep in mind that most carriers got rid of their unlimited plans, or they throttle the rate to a lower level after you hit a certain threshold.
 
probably safe estimating that you'll see about 10mb down and 5mb up per day, per rig.    i.e., 3g probably won't work for you.

Thanks for your reply:

Just for a matter of accuracy:
You mean:

10 Mega Bytes per day 10MB down and 5Mega Bytes per day up 5MB ? Right  ?
(not 10mega bits ... 10mb)

Regards.

[Striker]

The quote below may help though. The guy said he is using 36 MB per miner per day at btcguild. That is about 1 GB per month. 5 rigs, right at 5 gigs. The latency and everything although not great for first person shooters may give you a few more stale % than the fastest lowest latency connection, but probably won't be too bad when we are talking usually less than a second difference.

Cool!
That should do it.
I am also considering a Second card, but that cost much more I have to see what will happen and test it.

I bet there are people that are using aircards for mining. One card should be able to be shared by 5 machines no problem. If you did something like the mifi where it is a wireless hot spot, you could push that to an access point and then use traditional ethernet to route it to your machines.

If you happen to be in a clear.com 4g area, you can get a modem that converts it directly to ethernet. The 4g portion also has no 5 gb limit like the 3g side does and the price is still very competitive.

It's like this ... I am a Linux guy, so the only thing I need is one of those usb 3G pen modems from Vodafone (Huawey models) and a ethernet switch
That's it.
Nothing else to increase latency in the middle like wifi hotspots ...


Regards.

[Kermee]

10MB... Per day... PER WORKER (GPU).

Just wanted it to be clear

Cheers,
Kermee

[Striker]

Hi,

10MB... Per day... PER WORKER (GPU).

Just wanted it to be clear

Cheers,
Kermee

Thanks ... but this is still not clear

The 6990 have actually Two GPU's inside
So ...
I must assume the 10MB/day are for gpu's like 6970 and the like ?

A single 6990 would consume 20MB/day ?


Regards.

[Kermee]

The 6990 have actually Two GPU's inside

I must assume the 10MB/day are for gpu's like 6970 and the like ?

A single 6990 would consume 20MB/day ?

Regards.

Correct.

I'm pulling it based off of slush's calculations done a while ago:

Rough calculation:

One request: 300 bytes of HTTP request, 700 bytes of data ==> ~1 kB of data every 5 seconds for each worker. It is 12kB per minute per worker.

It actually comes out to about 17.2MB per day, per worker, but I think that's a bit on the high side.  Someone else said 36MB per day with BTC Guild... But I honestly think it's closer to 10MB per day... I don't think there's HTTP traffic every 5 seconds... Though I could be wrong.

One of these days, I'll actually do a tcpdump at the firewall and add up the traffic amounts over a 24 hours period.

Cheers,
Kermee

[MajorMiner]

Has anyone actually done this? I mean really put up a mining rig on a 3g or 4g network and has some empirical performance data to share?

Thank you!

P.S any chance of moving this out of the Newbies section into Mining where it can get some more eyeballs and hopefully responses?

[deslok]

I'll try one of mine on my EVO later today, on which note two questoins
1 how far is this from your house or other wifi would long range wifi be an option
2 you can purchase a used android device and then use it on sprint as a pay as you go through virgin for unlimited data only carrier left with it is sprint(and it's sub companies virgin and boost)

[Striker]

Hi,


I am not in the USA. I live and work in Europe.

I'll try one of mine on my EVO later today, on which note two questoins
1 how far is this from your house or other wifi would long range wifi be an option
2 you can purchase a used android device and then use it on sprint as a pay as you go through virgin for unlimited data only carrier left with it is sprint(and it's sub companies virgin and boost)

There are many reasons to use 3G and some are like this:

1 - Where I live the energy costs for residential houses is Huge. Much higher then enterprise/industrial installations.
So it is only profitable for me to have my rigs on industrial installations. Hence ... the need for remote access.

2 - I am out of the house all day because I work. I would not leave a bunch of very expensive gear alone.

3 - I do not have to listen to all that noise when I am at home.

4 - Neighbours would not complain about it either ...
.
.
.

Basically there are many reasons but the idea is that one must take advantage of resources already deployed in order to be cost effective, be it security, electricity, low annoyance levels  ... whatever.

The facility does have high bandwidth (ADSL 12Mbps or Cable), but I really doubt they will ever let me use it ... so it must be really 3G 7.2Mbps/1.44Mbps ...

I would really appreciate if someone could at least make a test with a setup like this and let us know the results.


Regards.

[deslok]

That puts the validity of testing my evo out since it's CDMA not GSM. Have you checked to see if there is wifi in the facility? If they won't let you tap into the network why would they let you use their power?

[Striker]

Hi,

That puts the validity of testing my evo out since it's CDMA not GSM. Have you checked to see if there is wifi in the facility? If they won't let you tap into the network why would they let you use their power?

I do not think they have wifi, but that is not the issue I could give then several wap's I have from Asus.
They have equipment that needs their link, so I really doubt they will ever let me even ask to use "their vital" connection.
Nearby I did not make a scan, I will do it with my phone as soon as I go there again.

About the power usage: Easy: I pay them a rate higher then the one they are charged .... profit for them
And Power they have a lot of it, moreover, they can always ask for more ... it is just a matter of requesting another contract and that can even lower their energy bill a bit more ...
And they have also a Huge amount of free space.

About the validity of your test I really do not agree.
Please make a small test at least in order to see if with CDMA it is a viable way to mine.

Apart from the possible different delays between the two networks if bandwidth wyse your test succeeds ... that is a really good indication of the hole concept being possible.

If someone else does have the possibility to make this experiment please let us know how it goes.
 
Regards.

[deslok]

My miners were unable to connect over 3g as a test i belive there may be too much delay in the connection but will try again later after looking for an improved wifi tether app.

[Striker]

Hi,

My miners were unable to connect over 3g as a test i belive there may be too much delay in the connection but will try again later after looking for an improved wifi tether app.

   ... that is really strange.
For all due purpose even with more delay 3G should work as any other say 3,6 Mbps or whatever your link supports.

Using a tether with some wifi device is really not a good approach.
It really increases the delay (my system will not be tethered) and it also poses the issue of what is blocked among the entire device chain ...
Could simply be a problem of your device blocking ports your miners normally use ... (other then the most obvious ones ...)

Regards.

[deslok]

Hi,

My miners were unable to connect over 3g as a test i belive there may be too much delay in the connection but will try again later after looking for an improved wifi tether app.

   ... that is really strange.
For all due purpose even with more delay 3G should work as any other say 3,6 Mbps or whatever your link supports.

Using a tether with some wifi device is really not a good approach.
It really increases the delay (my system will not be tethered) and it also poses the issue of what is blocked among the entire device chain ...
Could simply be a problem of your device blocking ports your miners normally use ... (other then the most obvious ones ...)

Regards.

I just wanted to update you on this, i installed the latest version of android tether during an update and managed to get my laptop to connect(a whoping 10mh out of it's quadro) so yes it's possible but i wouldnt run too many rigs off it, i'll try it with a production level rig (6x5830) when i get it stable later this week

[kirax]

Hi,

My miners were unable to connect over 3g as a test i belive there may be too much delay in the connection but will try again later after looking for an improved wifi tether app.

   ... that is really strange.
For all due purpose even with more delay 3G should work as any other say 3,6 Mbps or whatever your link supports.

Using a tether with some wifi device is really not a good approach.
It really increases the delay (my system will not be tethered) and it also poses the issue of what is blocked among the entire device chain ...
Could simply be a problem of your device blocking ports your miners normally use ... (other then the most obvious ones ...)

Regards.

I am up north in soviet canukistan, but I have a (decent) cell phone data plan/connection that I have used twice now as a backup: I just tethered my phone to a netbook that had booted an ubuntu live disk (over wifi, even, so extra hops because I was lazy) and then shared the connection out on my network. I have five machines, 10 workers, 3.8 GH total, at btcguild, and they rocked along fine while my ISP got around to eventually fixing it. Only ran for a couple hours, but they seemed to be operating at normal speeds: I don't know if stales might have been higher, though, too low of a sample size.

Now, as caveats, I am in a full coverage area, with a newish android phone, so I was running at .. I think it is HSDPA speed, 7.2 MB. (on rogers, if it's important) And, I have a 30 GB data plan, so I don't really have to care about the bits shuffled.