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

[fivejonnyfive]

All the blocks found in the last hour don't seem to be showing up on the site. It looks like there should be 281354, 281356, 281360?
I imagine It will catch up at some point, but just letting you know in case it's an issue.

Edit: Yep, there they are. Never mind!

[eleuthria]

Almost done cleaning the hot wallet out.  Also cleared up about half of the payouts that were showing incomplete data.  So far only 3 payouts were found that actually *failed* to process.  The rest were just lacking the txid association.

At current rate, payouts should be running again in under 2 hours.  A couple automatic payout runs will be executed manually in order to catch up to any backlog.

[HellDiverUK]

I think I must be one of the three payouts that failed, I did a manual payout a number of hours ago and nothing's appeared.

[eleuthria]

I think I must be one of the three payouts that failed, I did a manual payout a number of hours ago and nothing's appeared.

Yeah, manual payouts are the only ones that got stuck so far, I've yet to encounter a single auto payout that got stuck.  Which makes sense, because manual payouts use full 8 decimals for precision, leading to a *lot* more work being done by bitcoind in order to pick which inputs to use.

[HellDiverUK]

I think I must be one of the three payouts that failed, I did a manual payout a number of hours ago and nothing's appeared.

Yeah, manual payouts are the only ones that got stuck so far, I've yet to encounter a single auto payout that got stuck.  Which makes sense, because manual payouts use full 8 decimals for precision, leading to a *lot* more work being done by bitcoind in order to pick which inputs to use.

Roger.  No big fuss, I was just tidying up, I'm not waiting on the payout.

[eleuthria]

Payout server is re-indexing the blockchain with the barebones hot wallet file (just the block generation address) loaded.  Currently at block 210k of 281k.  The pool won't reflect any block solves until it's done reindexing.  Since it already *has* the data, this shouldn't take too much longer (just a lot of HDD thrashing).

Once that catches up, I'll be sending the old hot wallet contents back to the payment server.  Payouts will resume once that transaction has a few confirmations.

[HellDiverUK]

 Since it already *has* the data, this shouldn't take too much longer (just a lot of HDD thrashing).

wizkid057 discovered yesterday that SSD is your friend.  1.2GB/s he was reporting.

[eleuthria]

 Since it already *has* the data, this shouldn't take too much longer (just a lot of HDD thrashing).

wizkid057 discovered yesterday that SSD is your friend.  1.2GB/s he was reporting.

The actual pool servers and database server all run on SSDs.  The payout server is a bit outdated since it's not really doing anything that requires much HDD/CPU under normal circumstances.  It'll eventually get moved to an SSD system at some point.

[fivejonnyfive]

Thanks for the updates and for all your good work!

[eleuthria]

Manually adding the recently solved block to the appropriate shifts since the process of reindexing the blockchain is taking a bit more time than I expected.  Reindex up to block 230k of 281k now.

[MoreBloodWine]

The beginning of a new era:  https://blockchain.info/tx-index/6be69ab8b3faad4ee99c2323a25402413f00409efa0bc4641e84cd416dedab13

The first live block solved with the new software.  It has been deployed on 2 of the 4 public servers now.  I'm also comparing two slightly different variations of the backend on those servers to compare CPU load on the primary thread (network i/o processing).

These new servers are wired in very heavily to the alarm system so that they will alert me if they become unresponsive (not just crash).  After a few days, the remaining backend servers will be updated once the benchmarks between the two variations have enough data available.

I gotta say Elu, I'm litterally shocked at how involved you are... mind you not in a bad way but a good one. Don't get me wrong though, other pool ops are the same way. However, with he pools I have playd around with you seem to be the highest on the ladder with your involvement. That said, I'm just a small miner right now using two AM USB sticks, and while I could ever so slightly increase my payments by going to a "slightly smaller" pool. It's your involvement with this pool tha makes me want to stay, not that I had any thoughts on leaving or anything lol.

Either way, I'm def sticking around for the forseeable future, so soon as my 600Gh/s shows up, I'm gonna plug in in to a few sites for 24hrs to cash out owed balances but they will ulimately be living here !

Ps; That email about low worker warnings, might you add a text message option for phones so we can be alerated while away from home / not near a PC.

[eleuthria]

The beginning of a new era:  https://blockchain.info/tx-index/6be69ab8b3faad4ee99c2323a25402413f00409efa0bc4641e84cd416dedab13

The first live block solved with the new software.  It has been deployed on 2 of the 4 public servers now.  I'm also comparing two slightly different variations of the backend on those servers to compare CPU load on the primary thread (network i/o processing).

These new servers are wired in very heavily to the alarm system so that they will alert me if they become unresponsive (not just crash).  After a few days, the remaining backend servers will be updated once the benchmarks between the two variations have enough data available.

I gotta say Elu, I'm litterally shocked at how involved you are... mind you not in a bad way but a good one. Don't get me wrong though, other pool ops are the same way. However, with he pools I have playd around with you seem to be the highest on the ladder with your involvement. That said, I'm just a small miner right now using two AM USB sticks, and while I could ever so slightly increase my payments by going to a "slightly smaller" pool. It's your involvement with this pool tha makes me want to stay, not that I had any thoughts on leaving or anything lol.

Either way, I'm def sticking around for the forseeable future, so soon as my 600Gh/s shows up, I'm gonna plug in in to a few sites for 24hrs to cash out owed balances but they will ulimately be living here !

Ps; That email about low worker warnings, might you add a text message option for phones so we can be alerated while away from home / not near a PC.

BTC Guild has been my primary source of income for a little over a year and a half now.  That's one thing that's a bit different with BTC Guild compared to larger pools.  I quit my day job/career to pursue the pool in April 2012.  Additionally, I keep no staff.  It's not due to cost, but due to trust/efficiency.  Bitcoin is so dangerous when it comes to how readily available the money is, almost like a petty cash drawer in a small office working on the honor system, but instead of $100-200, it's $500,000-1,000,000 and it constantly gets refilled.  An 8 hour lapse of time (like for example, sleeping) with somebody else with any access to core functionality is literally a million dollar or greater liability.

As a result, I continue to work on additional monitoring, efficiency improvements, etc., to allow the pool to continue to scale to more users and more servers without the additional requirement of more staff.

[MoreBloodWine]

That's cool, but any thought on the Ps ?

[eleuthria]

That's cool, but any thought on the Ps ?

No plans on that front yet.  I tend to assume most users have smartphones capable of receiving email alerts.  Once things settle down with the heavier lifting (backend getting debugged/deployed and ScryptGuild), I may add a secondary email field specifically for alerts where users could set it to one of those SMS-emails that the various providers have.

[MoreBloodWine]

That's cool, but any thought on the Ps ?

No plans on that front yet.  I tend to assume most users have smartphones capable of receiving email alerts.  Once things settle down with the heavier lifting (backend getting debugged/deployed and ScryptGuild), I may add a secondary email field specifically for alerts where users could set it to one of those SMS-emails that the various providers have.

I have a smarphone, but I only get data over WiFi unless I fork out an extra $50 a month for 2gb of data. That's why I asked aboutt a SMS / Text alert option. So for those with data issues such as myself I feel it would be an added benefit.

[krampus]

Holy carp! Closing in on 4k TH/s.

[eleuthria]

Holy carp! Closing in on 4k TH/s.

A lot of failovers from Eligius due to some of their issues today.  At least it's nice to see a good chunk of their miners have failovers on multiple pools, I know a lot of users do not.


An update on the progress for the payouts:  I'm currently indexing the blockchain on two servers now.  The original payout server which has the blockchain locally, but is on slow hardware, and a secondary server which has ~260k blocks locally and is trying to download the remaining 21k to synchronize with the network.  The 2nd server is running on an SSD and has a much better processor as well.

Whichever one finishes first will be setup with the hot wallet in order to start processing payouts.  Sorry it's taking so long, but it looks like at least one server should be caught up within the hour.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to watch blockchain.info and add block solves manually so rewards are applied to their proper shifts as blocks are solved.

[spazzcat]

That's cool, but any thought on the Ps ?

No plans on that front yet.  I tend to assume most users have smartphones capable of receiving email alerts.  Once things settle down with the heavier lifting (backend getting debugged/deployed and ScryptGuild), I may add a secondary email field specifically for alerts where users could set it to one of those SMS-emails that the various providers have.

Maybe a IFTTT recipe?

[fivejonnyfive]

Maybe a IFTTT recipe?

Here's one I made that would text you the subject line of any new Gmail that matches the search "BTCguild"

https://ifttt.com/recipes/141122

Once he gets the alerts up and running and I know what the text in them will be, and what address they will come from, this can be made more specific, as this one would text you whenever anyone emailed you the word BTCguild.

[eleuthria]

Old server is reindexed up to block 259k.  New server had a corrupt data file and is doing a reindex as well (at 160k).  Now it's a race to the finish.  Coins are already in transit getting confirmations for payouts to resume.  Will update again as soon as one server is ready.


EDIT:
15 minutes later.  Old server at 260.5k, new server at 225k.