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

[allinvain]

Is there something going on with the pool? I'm getting tons of connections timeouts. Another pool that I mine at works just fine. Not sure if the problem is on my end of the pool's.

EDIT: Hmm...may have been a network hiccup on my end. Nevermind then.

[1713445339]

1713445339

[beekeeper]

Is there a way client can chose diff instead of proxy/server attempting to guess best diff for client?

[vphen]

Everything is still running smooth.  I am encouraging all users to switch to Stratum still.  The server has been rock solid and hasn't even needed a restart since it was moved to the primary pool.

I will when my mining software supports it.  Not really interested in using the proxy at the moment, although I can see some advantages to it.

The proxy is actually great for large farms even after native support is introduced, since it merges all the mining traffic for your whole farm into a single stratum connection.  For a small number of machines, I can understand waiting for native support.  Luckily ckolivas seems to be making good progress with cgminer.

Yes it really is working very well. Stales are down and efficiency is way up over the older standard pool connections. Stratum is the bees knees, the snake's hips', the kipper's knickers, and the cat's pyjamas. I'm looking forward to seeing what Con comes up with, as when more of the top tier mining software supports it natively, you'll see it take off even more. With ASICs just around the corner, this was a great move to future proof the pool. Excellent job in testing, and implementing the solution into the current pool without a hitch. As a fellow SysAdmin I can appreciate your hard work and dedication in making this transition pretty much a seamless one. Keep up the great work. Thank you.

with Stratum, Looks like It feels good, the Accepted % is much higher and the Stales are very lower than before when with GETWORK, ,
But until I fouced on the local stats data of my miner, the number of ACCEPTED is much higher than that on web UI's, and the REJECTED is also much higher than the sum of "Stale/Dupe/Other",
I think there must be some shares were accepted by proxy but finally were dropped by pool,
but I can't find the count of "DROPPEDs" in "Stale/Dupe/Other", Where did they go?

[slush]

I think there must be some shares were accepted by proxy but finally were dropped by pool,
but I can't find the count of "DROPPEDs" in "Stale/Dupe/Other", Where did they go?

Proxy never respond "accepted" without confirmation by the server. Actually only the oposite situation can happen; proxy won't submit the share which is obviously invalid/stale, because proxy does the full share validation locally.

[eleuthria]

I think there must be some shares were accepted by proxy but finally were dropped by pool,
but I can't find the count of "DROPPEDs" in "Stale/Dupe/Other", Where did they go?

Proxy never respond "accepted" without confirmation by the server. Actually only the oposite situation can happen; proxy won't submit the share which is obviously invalid/stale, because proxy does the full share validation locally.

The proxy responds accepted when it doesn't get confirmed by the server when dealing with higher difficulties.  I understand why you made it do that, since older miner software wasn't written correctly and crashed at higher diff, it's just annoying that miner accepted counts wont exactly match server counts when the proxy is masking lowdiff rejects as accepted.  Though it should be roughly the same.


Stale/Dupe are both reported on the BTC Guild website just fine.  "Other" rejects have been removed from reporting because they shouldn't be possible with stratum unless the server crashes and restarts.

[slush]

Oh, I completely forgot to this, because I'm still using diff1 shares. I'm sorry for confusion.

[eleuthria]

cgminer's latest github now has native stratum support for Linux users.

Over the weekend I will be doing a restart on the old pool servers to update bitcoind, and add new X-Stratum headers so that you can use cgminer load-balancing/failover on multiple BTC Guild servers over Stratum.  There will be 3 locations after the update:

stratum-de.btcguild.com (current DE server).  The DE server will automatically redirect native stratum clients to this server.
stratum.btcguild.com (Chicago, current pool servers).  The current BTC Guild servers will automatically redirect native stratum clients to this server.
The private DNS server will redirect native stratum clients to another server as well.


These DNS entries are not currently live!  I will post another update once they are enabled.

[eleuthria]

DE server had a few minutes of downtime as I deployed an updating bitcoind to the server.  A new stratum server for EU miners will be available tomorrow.  If you have a miner with native support, you will be able to continue pointing it at de.btcguild.com and it will automatically forward you to the DE stratum server.

[eleuthria]

The Germany stratum server has been put online.  You can connect to it by pointing a native stratum miner or the stratum proxy at de.btcguild.com port 8332 as you would with a regular miner.  It will provide you an redirection to connect to the Stratum backend.

[-ck]

First official version of cgminer supporting stratum, v2.8.0, has been released.

[eleuthria]

First official version of cgminer supporting stratum, v2.8.0, has been released.

Thank you very much for your work ckolivas.  Running it right now on my Ztex chips before I add an alert to the top of the website encouraging people to update.

[-ck]

First official version of cgminer supporting stratum, v2.8.0, has been released.

Thank you very much for your work ckolivas.  Running it right now on my Ztex chips before I add an alert to the top of the website encouraging people to update.

Thanks, and thanks for your generous donation for my work on this code. There will be a hotfix out shortly version 2.8.1 which should handle pool outages more gracefully than 2.8.0 as well.

[AndrewBUD]

Question. With Stratum mining.. I don't have to use a proxy if using the newest cgminer? 2.8.1 ?


Seems to be working.

[BitMinerN8]

I also have a question about Stratum. If the new build of cgminer has native support for Stratum, are we not back to having each miner talking directly to the pool? Not that it is a bad thing per se, I know that the Stratum protocol is more efficient. I am wondering if it would still be beneficial to run the Stratum Proxy and have 10 or more rigs use that one proxy vs. them all connecting directly.

[AndrewBUD]

I get it now... Proxy would be set up for multiple machines... With the native client you can connect directly...

[NEO2012]

I also have a question about Stratum. If the new build of cgminer has native support for Stratum, are we not back to having each miner talking directly to the pool? Not that it is a bad thing per se, I know that the Stratum protocol is more efficient. I am wondering if it would still be beneficial to run the Stratum Proxy and have 10 or more rigs use that one proxy vs. them all connecting directly.

in 30 days it would not matter if u know what im saying:)

[AndrewBUD]

I am curious about the use of different difficulties.

Once switched to Stratum my utility numbers in cgminer have dropped quite a bit.

[Shadow383]

Wow, ~300Gh/s added in 4 days? Where's that come from? Impressive 

[eleuthria]

I am curious about the use of different difficulties.

Once switched to Stratum my utility numbers in cgminer have dropped quite a bit.

THe "U" variable SHOULD drop under Stratum.  The U number is purely:  Work submitted per minute.  Since the difficulty is scaled to approximately one work unit per 4-6 seconds, you should see U floating between 10 and 15 on Stratum.  Even less if you're using the proxy (in the case of the proxy, your U would be equal to 10-15 if you combined all of your hardware).  This is not the case if the proxy is not being run with -rt (real-target), in which case the proxy doesn't give your cgminer the full difficulty, and instead hides the fact that lowdifficulty shares are never being sent to the pool.

I also have a question about Stratum. If the new build of cgminer has native support for Stratum, are we not back to having each miner talking directly to the pool? Not that it is a bad thing per se, I know that the Stratum protocol is more efficient. I am wondering if it would still be beneficial to run the Stratum Proxy and have 10 or more rigs use that one proxy vs. them all connecting directly.

Stratum is [at minimum] twice as efficient from a raw connection standpoint, since it doesn't have one hanging connection (LP) + "one" connection being opened/closed nonstop for work submission/requests.  It's actually more efficient since HTTP KeepAlive is not even close to as efficient as a single raw socket.  Additionally, the new Stratum pool server is coded in C++ over Java, which is showing massive improvements in both CPU and memory utilization.

From a bandwidth/processing power standpoint, it's not even close.  Stratum blows getwork away.

Question. With Stratum mining.. I don't have to use a proxy if using the newest cgminer? 2.8.1 ?


Seems to be working.

Correct, with native client support, you do not need to use the proxy.  In the future, large farms would benefit from using the proxy just to reduce overhead even further.  A single stratum connection per miner is around 0.5 KB/s (4 kbps) of bandwidth.  It's a bit less, but that's a high-end approximation.  If you had a farm of 100 individual mining clients, you'd be 400 kbps (again, probably more like 200 kbps, but using worst-case scenario).  A proxy for those 100 clients would reduce bandwidth back down to 4 kbps for your entire farm.

[BitMinerN8]

I am curious about the use of different difficulties.

Once switched to Stratum my utility numbers in cgminer have dropped quite a bit.

THe "U" variable SHOULD drop under Stratum.  The U number is purely:  Work submitted per minute.  Since the difficulty is scaled to approximately one work unit per 4-6 seconds, you should see U floating between 10 and 15 on Stratum.  Even less if you're using the proxy (in the case of the proxy, your U would be equal to 10-15 if you combined all of your hardware).  This is not the case if the proxy is not being run with -rt (real-target), in which case the proxy doesn't give your cgminer the full difficulty, and instead hides the fact that lowdifficulty shares are never being sent to the pool.

I also have a question about Stratum. If the new build of cgminer has native support for Stratum, are we not back to having each miner talking directly to the pool? Not that it is a bad thing per se, I know that the Stratum protocol is more efficient. I am wondering if it would still be beneficial to run the Stratum Proxy and have 10 or more rigs use that one proxy vs. them all connecting directly.

Stratum is [at minimum] twice as efficient from a raw connection standpoint, since it doesn't have one hanging connection (LP) + "one" connection being opened/closed nonstop for work submission/requests.  It's actually more efficient since HTTP KeepAlive is not even close to as efficient as a single raw socket.  Additionally, the new Stratum pool server is coded in C++ over Java, which is showing massive improvements in both CPU and memory utilization.

From a bandwidth/processing power standpoint, it's not even close.  Stratum blows getwork away.

Question. With Stratum mining.. I don't have to use a proxy if using the newest cgminer? 2.8.1 ?


Seems to be working.

Correct, with native client support, you do not need to use the proxy.  In the future, large farms would benefit from using the proxy just to reduce overhead even further.  A single stratum connection per miner is around 0.5 KB/s (4 kbps) of bandwidth.  It's a bit less, but that's a high-end approximation.  If you had a farm of 100 individual mining clients, you'd be 400 kbps (again, probably more like 200 kbps, but using worst-case scenario).  A proxy for those 100 clients would reduce bandwidth back down to 4 kbps for your entire farm.

Thanks! All great info. I just want to make sure I'm ready for the ASIC's and have the "farm to pool" configured for optimal settings.