Phoenix miner and high rejection rates

[greatwolf]

I'm getting a massive amount of rejected shares on many mining pools when using Phoenix-1.7.3. When turning on -v debugging it shows the reason for  rejection is due to unknown-work??

I already did a search of this problem and found this link. However, it's unclear to me what the real problem is. The rejection rate I'm seeing when I mine on say abcpool.co and simplecoin.us, I get like 90%+ rejection(eg. 2 accepts, 13 rejects). This doesn't happen when I use ufaminer. Oddly, bitcoinpool.com seems to be okay with phoenix.

Why does this happen and is there a way to fix this? I would have posted this on that thread I linked but since I'm a newbie, the forum won't allow me so I'm posting it here instead.

Thanks

[jake262144]

Beg your pardon but I was under an impression that Phoenix stable version was 1.7.3.

If your miner actually is 1.7.4 I suggest you switch to 1.7.3.
If you're pulling some crazy overclocking speeds clock your cards down for a while and see if that helps.

[greatwolf]

My apologizes, it's a typo on my part. The client I'm using really is 1.7.3 after double checking on it.

This is the command I'm running phoenix with:

Code:

phoenix.exe -k poclbm PLATFORM=0 WORKSIZE=128 -q 2 -u http://user:password@bitcoinpool.com:8334

I'm not doing any crazy overclocking at all. This is with an nvidia GTS250. Like I said, when using ufa-miner that uses the combined hashing power of my Q6600 and my GPU I get a slightly higher hashing rate of 44-45 Mhash/s with no rejections. But when I try to use phoenix, I get 34-35 Mhash/s since only the GPU is working and the CPU isn't used. With phoenix I get the high rejection rates that I mentioned in my first post.

[jake262144]

Nvidia? Huh...

One of these should work:
phoenix -k poclbm VECTORS BFI_INT PLATFORM=0 WORKSIZE=128  AGGRESSION=9 -u http://user:password@bitcoinpool.com:8334
phoenix -k poclbm VECTORS PLATFORM=0 WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=9 -u http://user:password@bitcoinpool.com:8334
phoenix -k poclbm PLATFORM=0 WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=9 -u http://user:password@bitcoinpool.com:8334

[greatwolf]

Setting a higher aggression didn't really help and it only increases the display lag.

Here's the log after running this for a little bit:

phoenix.exe -k poclbm PLATFORM=0 WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=9 -q 2 -u http://username:password@pool.abcpool.co:8332 -v

[21/01/2012 05:01:04] Phoenix v1.7.3 starting...
[21/01/2012 05:01:04] Connected to server
[21/01/2012 05:01:04] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:01:04] New block (WorkQueue)
[21/01/2012 05:01:05] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:01:05] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:01:48] Result 0000000071a88bbd... accepted
[21/01/2012 05:01:48] LP: New work pushed
[21/01/2012 05:01:48] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:01:48] New block (WorkQueue)
[21/01/2012 05:01:49] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:01:49] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:01:53] Result 0000000088833ce5... accepted
[21/01/2012 05:03:45] Disconnected from server
[21/01/2012 05:04:00] Connected to server
[21/01/2012 05:04:00] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:04:25] Reject reason: unknown-work
[21/01/2012 05:04:25] Result 000000009279df6e... rejected
[21/01/2012 05:05:43] Disconnected from server
[21/01/2012 05:05:58] Connected to server
[21/01/2012 05:05:58] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:07:40] Disconnected from server
[21/01/2012 05:07:55] Connected to server
[21/01/2012 05:07:55] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:08:25] Reject reason: unknown-work
[21/01/2012 05:08:25] Result 0000000017168aae... rejected
[21/01/2012 05:09:37] Disconnected from server
[21/01/2012 05:09:53] Connected to server
[21/01/2012 05:09:53] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:10:01] LP: New work pushed
[21/01/2012 05:10:01] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:10:01] New block (WorkQueue)
[21/01/2012 05:10:01] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:10:02] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:11:58] Disconnected from server
[21/01/2012 05:12:13] Connected to server
[21/01/2012 05:12:13] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:12:37] Reject reason: unknown-work
[21/01/2012 05:12:37] Result 00000000a78bd24e... rejected
[21/01/2012 05:12:53] LP: New work pushed
[21/01/2012 05:12:53] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:12:53] New block (WorkQueue)
[21/01/2012 05:12:53] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[21/01/2012 05:12:53] Server gave new work; passing to WorkQueue
[36.60 Mhash/sec] [2 Accepted] [3 Rejected] [RPC (+LP)]

Here's the exact page I'm referring to from my original post. The problem is mentioned by phoenix author himself.

[jake262144]

Neither VECTORS nor BFI_INT worked with your nvidia card? Bleh...
Did you per chance try changing the kernel to phatk or phatk2? (-k phatk / -k phatk2)?
As to phoenix being admittedly flawed, your only chance would be going with another miner.
If phatk does work for you I suggest you go with cgminer.

[greatwolf]

phatk & phatk2 only works with amd gpu's as I understand it.

Yes I could use another miner and atm I'm using ufa-miner but my original question was why is this happening with phoenix?

As an extreme example, I test mined on my laptop to see if the same thing still happens. Using ufa-miner at 9.5-10 MHash/s, all or most of the submitted shares are accepted. Now I switch to Phoenix, giving a ~11 MHash/s but with the same kind of high rejection rates. The first 1 or 2 submits would show accepted but almost all subsequent submits would show rejected and all for the same reason.

[jake262144]

EDIT::Today is your lucky day. Phoenix 1.7.4 has just been released like half hour ago.
EDIT::Grab it and see whether those nasty stales have gone away.

Phoenix is currently flawed. Due to some glitch in the code it doesn't work correctly with low hash rates.
Nothing can be done until the Jedi95 locates and fixes that bug.

My previous suggestions were aimed at helping you to improve your hash rate, hopefully to the sane level.
I have no experience on running miners on Nvidia cards, hence the suggestions to try VECTORS and BFI_INT.
If you're thinking about some serious mining your best option is to sell that card and replace it with an AMD card.
35 MHash/s is almost negligible. An inexpensive hd6770 is capable of pulling 231 MHash/s.
A single overclocked hd6950 will do better than 360MHash/s - that's an order of magnitude faster.

[jedi95]

I'm getting a massive amount of rejected shares on many mining pools when using Phoenix-1.7.3. When turning on -v debugging it shows the reason for  rejection is due to unknown-work??

I already did a search of this problem and found this link. However, it's unclear to me what the real problem is. The rejection rate I'm seeing when I mine on say abcpool.co and simplecoin.us, I get like 90%+ rejection(eg. 2 accepts, 13 rejects). This doesn't happen when I use ufaminer. Oddly, bitcoinpool.com seems to be okay with phoenix.

Why does this happen and is there a way to fix this? I would have posted this on that thread I linked but since I'm a newbie, the forum won't allow me so I'm posting it here instead.

Thanks

The cause of this problem is low overall hashrate. Phoenix maintains a work queue to reduce hashrate disruptions caused by momentary connection problems. This works great on faster hardware like the ATI 5870, but it can cause issues with miners that get <100 Mhash or so. The reason for "unknown-work" rejects is that those shares were from work that has been sitting in the queue for long periods of time. (>1 minute) Some pools "forget" about assigned work after very shot time periods (1 minute for example) and any results returned based on that work are rejected as unknown. This problem has been known for a couple weeks, but I haven't come up with a proper solution for it yet.

Updating to 1.7.4 won't help in this case, because the changes were aimed at improving P2Pool compatibility only.

Your best option is to try another pool. Not every pool forgets about assigned work quickly.

[jake262144]

Thanks for the clarification Jedi. Getting accurate info from the actual developer is more then I could hope for

[greatwolf]

Thank you for explaining and clarifying the issue jedi I would mark your answer as accepted if this forum supported that feature.

[deepceleron]

I had the 99% percent rejected problem on a 9800GT long ago(was 8800GT, now renamed GTS250), it worked okay on guiminer though. Now I don't waste my electricity.

[jedi95]

Update:

Phoenix 2.0.0 beta corrects the unknown-work problem on slower hardware. The work queue in Phoenix 2 is aware of work age and will discard any work that is too old.

You can get the beta here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62765.0