[~1000 GH/sec] BTC Guild - 0% Fee Pool, LP, SSL, Full Precision, and More

[Druas]

Eleuthria: Is it possible to show corrupted shares as a separate stat from stales instead of a single stale count? Since many of us are overclocking our cards, it would be helpful to know if some of us have overdone it and actually wasting resources and submitting corrupted shares.

I am not 100% sure, but I think DiabloMiner has a thing called HW Error which helps with this.

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[eleuthria]

As far as I'm aware, all miners do a self-check using the CPU before sending a share to the server.  This is why poclbm will sometimes say "Hardware verification failed" (might be slightly different wording).

The three most common rejects are (in order):
  1) Stale share
  2) Unknown Work
  3) Duplicate


1 is your generic stale.

2 and 3 are very rare, and tend to be the result of misbehaving mining proxies.  Unknown work is generally caused by a client attempting to failover to another server and sending the share it got from the original server to a different one, or a mining proxy doing a similar function.

[PcChip]

I sent you an email from Mike Dawson at Gmail yesterday and haven't heard back, did it get marked as spam or are you just busy? (no problem if you are!)

Also, I just created a secondary BTCGuild account for testing, and even though every setting is exactly the same as my primary account, when I launch the miner on the secondary test account, it keeps saying unable to connect (or in the case of cgminer, it crashes).  Any clue?

[eleuthria]

The new US Central server was delivered yesterday to the colo, and I'm working on setting it up over the next few days.  It will eventually replace the current East/Central, leaving the pool with two separate servers with multiple sub-servers and load balancing.

This new server will stop problems like we had earlier today where US East stopped handing out work for about 20 minutes due to pushpool freezing up.

[PcChip]

Do you have some kind of IP blocking enabled, where for example if someone from the same IP is trying to mine from two separate BTCGuild accounts, it blocks the second one ?

I made a second test account and cannot for the life of me figure out why none of my miners work with it, even when using the EXACT same arguments as my original workers that are mining just fine!

[sirky]

Do you have some kind of IP blocking enabled, where for example if someone from the same IP is trying to mine from two separate BTCGuild accounts, it blocks the second one ?

I made a second test account and cannot for the life of me figure out why none of my miners work with it, even when using the EXACT same arguments as my original workers that are mining just fine!

It shouldn't be the exact same arguments, since the login is user_miner and the pass is user_pass

So if you have a different login you have different miner credentials.

[eleuthria]

Do you have some kind of IP blocking enabled, where for example if someone from the same IP is trying to mine from two separate BTCGuild accounts, it blocks the second one ?

I made a second test account and cannot for the life of me figure out why none of my miners work with it, even when using the EXACT same arguments as my original workers that are mining just fine!

There's no such blocking.  Send me a PM with the details you're using and I'll take a look (probably won't be able to respond until tomorrow morning).


I've been working on the new server, which is set to replace US Central and US East.  I'm working on a new configuration for the internal network and load balancer, which should eliminate some of the issues that US West has around long polls.  As usual, there's no way to be sure that the limited testing will scale properly when put into production.

The new server will likely be linked up with the website and other pushpool instances tomorrow evening and opened up as a 4th server.  If there are no issues overnight, I will begin moving the DNS entries for US East and Central to the new server, and close them off entirely Sunday evening (assuming the new server isn't choking).

After a good period of testing (~1 week under load), I will attempt to point US West at the new server for a few hours to give it a solid stress test.  If it doesn't choke during the stress test, US West will have a brief maintenance window (approx 1 hour) to upgrade the server load balancing configuration to what the new server is using.

[TheMalon]

I've started to single out suspect accounts which are either being used by a lot of IPs, or showing a large number getworks with low return rates/speed (likely to be a very large CPU mining operation).

While CPU mining is not banned from BTC Guild, they are discouraged when used in large numbers.  They are ineffective, slow, and anybody running them is likely doing so either behind the owner's back (computer lab/client computers of an IT company), or by misinforming the owner's ("They're on 24/7 anyway").

There is absolutely no situation I can find where it is cost effective for somebody to be running a CPU server farm for mining.  Somebody is going to eat that bill, and I highly doubt its the person running them.  By running these huge numbers of CPU miners, you are negatively impacting the rest of the pool.  Each CPU miner is consuming server resources similar to a GPU miner.  Long poll sessions are a fixed cost for the pool regardless of the miner speed.  Additionally, most of these CPU miners are asking for work every 5 or 10 seconds, even though they take many minutes to send something back.

If your account gets singled out, you will see a large warning on the My Account page directing you to a special server address which has long polling disabled.  This special server was put in place to keep the primary servers healthy and running stable.

As too often happens ... this is a bad solution to a problem generated by another bad solution.

LP is a good example of bad design!
So ... someone thought that an additional service that will signal the miner that the block has changed will stop the miner from doing obsolete work! Great idea! Being a great idea another (or the same) person find a solution -> LP (https://deepbit.net/longpolling.php).
The problem with LP is

Miner starts a request to long polling URL with GET method and same basic authorization as on main connection.
This request is not answered by server until new block is found by bitcoin network.

What does this actually means server side is: Allocate resources and keep them blocked for EVERY miner till a new block arrives.
Doing so ... you will remove resources from the actual mining and keep them in an IDLE state!

Now ... your solution (to move the CPU miners to another server with no LP) will not actually resolve the problem. Because the miners will start lo lower the ask rate for new work to minimize the losses. So you will move the resources from IDLE state (non-productive) to GENERATE NEW WORK (non-productive again because the work will be dropped in a few seconds).

I think its time to do some real design (server and client friendly) for a new mining API.

Let me know if you need a hand!

Ciao

[TheMalon]

Now I have a "little" request for you about:

I've started to single out suspect accounts which are either being used by a lot of IPs, or showing a large number getworks with low return rates/speed (likely to be a very large CPU mining operation).

Can you put in the forum (or send me) what are the numbers you are talking about? Something like:
#miners | #new getwork requests | #getwork requests with data submision | #getwork requests with VALID data submision
Of course the analyzed time-frame will have to be BETWEEN 2 block changes (eventually, a full round with the LP events (new block) marked so we can divide  data per every block)!

Ciao

[eleuthria]

Sync issue on US East again last night from a 22 second round, caused our blocks to not announce for a few hours.  Just fixed it and the blocks have been announced.  Our luck had a -massive- swing last night from around -7% to +8.3% since this difficulty kicked in.

[epdp14]

Sync issue on US East again last night from a 22 second round, caused our blocks to not announce for a few hours.  Just fixed it and the blocks have been announced.  Our luck had a -massive- swing last night from around -7% to +8.3% since this difficulty kicked in.

I was wondering what happened. I checked yesterday afternoon as was right at expected value for my hash rate and this morning I was 20% lower (for the rolling 24hr average). Thanks for staying on top of things so well.

[jjiimm_64]

Im hoping this latest 3 hour block is the same thing


guess not  

Usually things ebb and flow.  our luck has been ebbing for weeks, I would like to see it start flowing again!!

[eleuthria]

Im hoping this latest 3 hour block is the same thing


guess not  

Usually things ebb and flow.  our luck has been ebbing for weeks, I would like to see it start flowing again!!

We're at positive luck since the difficulty change, even with the 5.8m block shoved in there.  That's after we were at -7% luck this difficulty last night.  I'd say the past 24 hours have been flowing pretty well, enough to makeup for the bad start.

[jjiimm_64]

I agree the last day has went well, but I want to see the orange line above the blue line
https://www.btcguild.com/pool_charts.php

[eleuthria]

I agree the last day has went well, but I want to see the orange line above the blue line
https://www.btcguild.com/pool_charts.php

Won't happen unless difficulty plummets.  The days of 1 GH/s being >= 1 BTC/day are over.

[sirky]

I agree the last day has went well, but I want to see the orange line above the blue line
https://www.btcguild.com/pool_charts.php

Won't happen unless difficulty plummets.  The days of 1 GH/s being >= 1 BTC/day are over.

Maybe we can have a +120% luck day like BTC Mine did a while ago!

[jjiimm_64]

OUCH..  does that mean the orange line will fall farther and farther away from the blue until mining is no longer profitable...bummer.

I guess I always knew this, but seeing it in this light gives it more....meaning.

[sirky]

OUCH..  does that mean the orange line will fall farther and farther away from the blue until mining is no longer profitable...bummer.

I guess I always knew this, but seeing it in this light gives it more....meaning.

Who knows. Diff will likely keep increasing, but maybe price will too. No one knows when mining will be unprofitable.

[hugolp]

OUCH..  does that mean the orange line will fall farther and farther away from the blue until mining is no longer profitable...bummer.

I guess I always knew this, but seeing it in this light gives it more....meaning.

Who knows. Diff will likely keep increasing, but maybe price will too. No one knows when mining will be unprofitable.

Mining will never be unprofitable for all (except maybe in very short periods). But mining has very low barriers of entries and will become a very low yield activity.

[eleuthria]

OUCH..  does that mean the orange line will fall farther and farther away from the blue until mining is no longer profitable...bummer.

I guess I always knew this, but seeing it in this light gives it more....meaning.

Well, technically the orange line could go above the blue.  Each line is running at different increments.  Right now they won't because you're looking at a 60 day average, where difficulty has massively changed.  If a 60 day period ended up being a steady/declining difficulty, eventually the BTC earned line would be above the speed estimate line.