[CLOSED] BTC Guild - Pays TxFees+NMC, Stratum, VarDiff, Private Servers

[eleuthria]

A brief restart was done on all the non-stratum pools to update the pool software so it will advertise the x-stratum header.  Miners that natively support stratum should automatically be redirected to the stratum pool as a result.

Stratum pool will be restarted in a few hours, with expected downtime of about 5 seconds.  At that time you will begin having your stratum shares show up in your main account page.  The beta page will stick around, but the notice will be gone.  The Stratum earnings line on the Earnings History will have a link to the beta page so you can always confirm the earnings were properly applied to your balance.

[eleuthria]

Payouts for the Stratum beta have been pushed out to everyone's main account again.  The pool was restarted a few times over the last 5 minutes to update the Stratum pool.  It is now awarding NMC and BTC, and is linked to the primary BTC Guild website stats.

I will be working on some updates to help push people towards Stratum (the first step being the stratum redirect header to the old pool servers which was added this morning).


EDIT/UPDATE:  I'm also working on a tweak to bitcoind to get faster work generation immediately after a new block hits the network.  Hopefully this will reduce stales even more than they've already been reduced.

[eleuthria]

Stratum pool had what is hopefully it's last restart for a while.  I restarted to add in the update which speeds up work pushes when a new block hits.  This should roughly double the speed the pool pushes out the new work for an LP, which means stale rates should be around half of what they were before.  The Stratum pool should be < 0.1% rejects for most users.  Very poor latency/spotty connections will obviously still have more stales than an average user.

[vphen]

why the private server entry removed from the main menu

[eleuthria]

why the private server entry removed from the main menu

The private DNS is still active.  However, Stratum is _HIGHLY_ recommended over the private DNS.  My recommendation would be using the Stratum proxy and pointing it at the private DNS.  This will redirect you to the Stratum pool.  Once most of the pool is on Stratum, I will likely enable a private-stratum server using the same private DNS entries.


EDIT/UPDATE:  I've added Stratum Protocol and Variable Difficulty links to the 'Help and Support' section of the sidebar for logged in users.  These explain the benefits of Stratum, and also how variable difficulty works.

[vphen]

Is it still 100% PPS mining with stratum?

[os2sam]

It would be cool to still have the stratum speed vs. the legacy pool speed at the top of the page.

Will you ever discontinue the old protocol?
Thanks,
Sam

[eleuthria]

Is it still 100% PPS mining with stratum?

The normal fee has been applied.  The 100% PPS was only to encourage people to move over and get the protocol + new server some load testing.

It would be cool to still have the stratum speed vs. the legacy pool speed at the top of the page.

Will you ever discontinue the old protocol?
Thanks,
Sam

If you hover over the 'Pool Speed' text at the top of the page, it shows a breakdown of Getwork vs Stratum pool speeds.  I'll probably never be able to completely get rid of the old Getwork pools, but hopefully I can get it down to less than 5% of the pool once more mining software has native support.

[eleuthria]

This is a request/suggestion to people using the Stratum pool.  Please consider resetting your worker stats if you have not done so in the last 12 hours (~3 AM PDT).  That was the last restart on the Stratum pool, where I made a major update to how quickly longpolls are processed in bitcoind and relayed to the pool.

Since reset, my small farm (~2 GH/s using 10 ztex FPGAs and the Stratum Proxy) has had a 99.99% acceptance rate (23500 accepts, 4 stales).  If you're having worse stats than you had on getwork, please send me an email or a PM so I can investigate where you're having issues.  But make sure your stats were reset recently, so we know it wasn't related to the stopping/starting that happened this morning when pushing the updates.

[poohbah]

I've been seeing 99.9%+ since the start of using stratum (I just reset it as requested). I'm loving the accept rate. I had 2%+ on other pools so this is very nice to see.

I jumped into this pool just because I'm a cheap-ass and the no fee sounded good. I think I'll stick around.

[eleuthria]

I've been seeing 99.9%+ since the start of using stratum (I just reset it as requested). I'm loving the accept rate. I had 2%+ on other pools so this is very nice to see.

I jumped into this pool just because I'm a cheap-ass and the no fee sounded good. I think I'll stick around.

Just to make sure you're aware:  The fee is back to the original 5% PPS fee.  The 0% was purely because the Stratum pool was in "beta", and it wouldn't have been fair to miners to have them run on experimental protocols/pool software which may be unstable while still taking a fee from submissions.

[poohbah]

Just to make sure you're aware:  The fee is back to the original 5% PPS fee.  The 0% was purely because the Stratum pool was in "beta", and it wouldn't have been fair to miners to have them run on experimental protocols/pool software which may be unstable while still taking a fee from submissions.

I understand. That was the point of my second comment. It might have read "I think I'll stick around even with the fee."

[poohbah]

I'm having a problem, I think. My NMC is registering fine on 2 of 2 machines that are connecting through the same stratum proxy. Miner #2 is not registering on the website as accepted BTC shares (0%, it shows 300-350 mhash, but zero accepted and zero rejected). The shares are showing as accepted by cgminer and by the proxy, but they are not showing up on the website. I shut down miner #1 to make sure that they aren't just getting added to the #1 count. I also restarted the proxy. I just can't seem to get miner #2 to show up on the website stats even though #2 seems to be almost real time.

[eleuthria]

I'm having a problem, I think. My NMC is registering fine on 2 of 2 machines that are connecting through the same stratum proxy. Miner #2 is not registering on the website as accepted BTC shares (0%, it shows 300-350 mhash, but zero accepted and zero rejected). The shares are showing as accepted by cgminer and by the proxy, but they are not showing up on the website. I shut down miner #1 to make sure that they aren't just getting added to the #1 count. I also restarted the proxy. I just can't seem to get miner #2 to show up on the website stats even though #2 seems to be almost real time.

It looks like you reset your BTC stats and NMC stats at different times for Worker #2.  Your shares are being counted still, it's just out of sync because you didn't reset them simultaneously.  I've synchronized the NMC/BTC stat reset for you.

[poohbah]

Nope, worker #2 is still not showing up for BTC shares. Everything else looks fine.

The data below from the BTG website is a very short run, but its what I've been seeing for at least an hour or two. Total speed would be about 900mhash if I wasn't stopping and starting.

Worker Summary (BTC)
name_1   182.54 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:04   
name_2   336.84 MH/s   0 (0.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:14   
Totals   519.38 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0      

Worker Summary (NMC)
name_1   182.54 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:04   
name_2   336.84 MH/s   31 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:14   
Totals   519.38 MH/s   46 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0      

[eleuthria]

Nope, worker #2 is still not showing up for BTC shares. Everything else looks fine.

The data below from the BTG website is a very short run, but its what I've been seeing for at least an hour or two. Total speed would be about 900mhash if I wasn't stopping and starting.

Worker Summary (BTC)
name_1   182.54 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:04   
name_2   336.84 MH/s   0 (0.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:14   
Totals   519.38 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0      

Worker Summary (NMC)
name_1   182.54 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:04   
name_2   336.84 MH/s   31 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:14   
Totals   519.38 MH/s   46 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0      

Are you mining with the stratum proxy connected to stratum.btcguild.com, port 9332?  Or are you using poclbm with native support (and if so, what address is it pointed at)?

[poohbah]

I fixed it. I had the old stratum IP in the proxy launch bat file. I changed it to stratum.btcguild.com and miner #2 seems to be registering now. Did I miss the announcement about changing that?

Shares are showing up now. Did I just lose a bunch of shares since the changeover?

[eleuthria]

I fixed it. I had the old stratum IP in the proxy launch bat file. I changed it to stratum.btcguild.com and miner #2 seems to be registering now. Did I miss the announcement about changing that?

Shares are showing up now. Did I just lose a bunch of shares since the changeover?

You didn't lose any shares from beta.  They just don't show up under 'My Account'.  You can find your old beta stats/earnings by going to Earnings History.  It contains a line of how much you were paid from Beta, and it has a link to the old beta stats page with your share details from beta.

I reset your stats again to look at it myself, and I've verified that this entire time you have had BTC and NMC shares being counted.  The database field which keeps track of resets shows you had 5495 btc and NMC shares accepted prior to the stat reset, and the current accepted counts match between NMC and BTC.

[eleuthria]

Nope, worker #2 is still not showing up for BTC shares. Everything else looks fine.

The data below from the BTG website is a very short run, but its what I've been seeing for at least an hour or two. Total speed would be about 900mhash if I wasn't stopping and starting.

Worker Summary (BTC)
name_1   182.54 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:04   
name_2   336.84 MH/s   0 (0.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:14   
Totals   519.38 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0      

Worker Summary (NMC)
name_1   182.54 MH/s   15 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:04   
name_2   336.84 MH/s   31 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0   0:00:14   
Totals   519.38 MH/s   46 (100.00%)   0 / 0 / 0      

I think I found out your problem...I think you were refreshing the page after resetting your stats, meaning you kept submitting the POST data telling the page to reset your stats .

[poohbah]

I think I found out your problem...I think you were refreshing the page after resetting your stats, meaning you kept submitting the POST data telling the page to reset your stats .

You may be right. I don't know. I just tried pointing to the IP and it seems to work.

All seems well now.