just restarted my miner and working away again, and just wanted to say something on my opinion of people jumping off the mining pool for another. i will admit i stop mining with you from time to time, to turn my pc off, i don't own a dedicated mining rig, what i use is my everyday gaming rig that i just so happen to mine on. This sits right next to my bed and has several fans running on it meaning there are nights that i can't sleep due to the constant noise and so it all goes off. While i realise you want to make sure people are mining for the whole length of time, and i have discussed with you before my very strange and ongoing efficiency problems, i joined this pool as the payout was based on what work i'd done in the pool, whether i'd had to turn my rig off or had it running the entire time instead of one like slush' where my down time would have me penalised. So while i'd like to see people staying with you're pool the entire time and i agree with you're points on the mathematical 'proofs' being mentioned in here, i'd rather not be punished for having my pc off one night and not getting any coins from a block because of it
I agree. People should be able to come and go as they please, and not be punished for leaving (because they want to sleep, watch a movie, play a game, or whatever people do with their systems.) This is the reason why I've been against implementing anything that punishes people for leaving the pool.
We started this pool to show efficiency of miners and the effects it has on the pool itself. Because everybody seems to have an opinion about how things should be run, and because we've made several required bug fixes to the pool software, we've gotten distracted from the fact that we started this to show efficiency and how it effects finding blocks.
In light of remembering why we started this pool, we will be making some changes in the up coming days, and the inefficient miners are going to feel the effects of it. If you haven't increased your askrate on your miner, or are not using poclbm-mod, and your efficiency remains low (< 50% or whatever % we choose), you'll be finding yourself going to another pool.
Here is how you determine what your askrate should be. Use the average speed of your card when doing this math.
(2^32) / (your card speed)
For example. 1 of my GPUs does about 171,000,000 hashes per second.
(2^32) / ( 171000000 ) = 25.116767812865497076023391812865 seconds.
Round that number, and you get 25 seconds. My askrate would then be 25 seconds.
I do understand that some of the other miner programs were not built to be efficient, and may not let you set your askrate above 10 (poclbm) or 60 (jgarzik's CPU miner) seconds. This is why you should use poclbm-mod if possible. It will work through the entire getwork, then request another, which results in a higher level of efficiency. Before we make this change that will effect inefficient miners, we'll be releasing a very slighty modified version of jgarzik's miner for the CPU miners. The only change will be we remove the 60 second maximum askrate and increase it. What would be ideal would be if jgarzik's CPU miner knew when it was finished working through the entire getwork THEN requests another one, but neither Geebus or myself are going to recode/redesign the behavior of another miner since we already did this to poclbm, and we just don't have the time right now to make major changes to another miner. Hence why we'll be making a very slight change and then leaving it up to the user to figure out what their askrate should be.
However, there is no need to even have an askrate if your miner can:
1) Work through the entire getwork before asking for another ( check all 2^32 hashes )
2) Detect when the block changed and receive a new getwork ( long polling )
Poclbm-mod meets both those conditions, and our server supports long polling. If jgarzik's miner could meet the first condition, then it would be the ideal CPU miner.
Again, with an efficient miner AND long polling there would be no more need for an askrate in the miner.
