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

[lemosax]

the hashrate of the pool has grown a lot in the last couple days, the amount you get per block may have gone down, but the number of blocks/day should be higher

Thank you!  That makes so much sense.  I'm just happy to see it stable and will keep giving my 2.5% toward more good things.

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[Veldy]

Sorry if this is slightly off topic but I can't figure out why the earnings appear to be down about 30%.  I was consistently seeing around 0.08 BTC per Ghash/sec per block with some natural variance.  After sometime on 6/8 or 6/9, it looks like that dropped and remains closer to 0.55 BTC.

Was there a difficulty increase around that time?  Or is this just a function of the increased usage after the new servers came online, and maybe there's some other upside to offset this that I'm not understanding.

My own stats are a bit difficult to look at in a vacuum as I've recently added additional hardware, roughly doubling my hash rate but increasing the payouts considerably less.

Thanks - sorry if this is really a novice question, but I'm kind of a novice still.

Others may have answered the question and I am sorry if I duplicate anything.

1.  Higher difficulty lately [late Sunday early Monday CDT was a 33+% increase].
2.  Block size varies with a given difficulty period and lately blocks have been significantly larger than difficulty would suggest.  This affects all pools and solo miners equally (the good news is that future blocks should have some smaller than normal sizes).  <-- This is the one I suspect most people aren't paying attention too
3a.  Your own personal luck [I don't actually believe in luck, so let's use "statistical variation"].
3b.  Pool luck [same as above, but as a group there is statistical variation ... past never affects the future, so pool jumping to escape this is useless].
4.  You are hashing at the same rate [presumably all your miners are the same and running], but perhaps you are getting more stale/rejected shares?  I advise to stay away from Phoenix if you want to reduce those significantly [unless you use the phatk kernel with 58xx and maybe other 5xxx series cards where my 5850 sees more than a 3% increase in hash rate offsetting the defect in phoenix stale shares].
5. You aren't donating 2.5% and thus not paid for invalid blocks [deepbit.net pays out for invalid blocks, but they charge 3% flat anyway, so ... there you go ].
6. Communication glitches ... watch your logs and run a traceroute and ping test to the pools and see if you are having issues [it is tough to know which pool you are connected too if you use the load balancer which is host btcguild.com ... although if you are running Linux, you can just use tcpdump to figure it out quickly].  You may have to select a pool specifically; if so, check from time to time whether you need to leave it that way; sometimes it is a temporary network issue between you and the pool and it is best for the pool at large to use btcguild.com as the host.

Just a brain dump of the things that come to mind for me immediately upon reading your post.  Things I had to do when I first [re]connected last night [while things were still settling in fact].

[zale]

For whatever reason, uswest.btcguild.com gives me idles and an occasional connection issue

I have the same problem for eu.btcguild.com. Happens all the time so I don't think there are block calculations running. I also have around 4-5% stales.

[Veldy]

the hashrate of the pool has grown a lot in the last couple days, the amount you get per block may have gone down, but the number of blocks/day should be higher

Thank you!  That makes so much sense.  I'm just happy to see it stable and will keep giving my 2.5% toward more good things.

It hardly makes sense to even consider 2.0% as it seems invalid blocks make up more than 0.5% of the recent blocks [although that is probably not true historically across all pools].  BTCMine recently saw several invalid blocks in a couple of days and of those blocks, several of the rounds which they ended were long rounds for that pool.

So far, this pool is fabulous.  The three I like best are BTC Guild, Deepbit and BTCMine [until the operator started acting a little nuts ... although he seems to be coming around].  Deepbit is large enough, so this pool is the refreshing change that I have been looking for   A happy day indeed when this was put together!

[d.james]

bug report Solved:  Newly created worker password does NOT work, all older worker passwords are interchangeable.

Let me explain the situation in details:
(the following accounts/pass are all FAKE so plz don't try )

Account = "Guild"
worker1 = AMD; pass = amd
worker2 = Nvidia; pass = nvidia

Everything works fine except I can use either password for both workers:
BUG:  using Guild_AMD pass: nvidia ALSO works
        using Guild_Nvidia pass: amd works as well

Now I have created 3 more New workers named 1 2 & 3:

Guild_1, pass: 1  (not working)
Guild_2, pass: 2  (not working)
Guild_3, pass: 3  (not working)

But, using my old worker password "amd" or "nvidia" WORKS for all 3 new workers.

Intentional or bug?  

[Sukrim]

Intentional or bug?  

Intentional.

Nobody in their right mind would mine for a different person anyways so password for workers are at the moment silently ignored.

[d.james]

Mystery solved 

I guess you're right, just tried a bunch of random worker passwords and they all worked

My new worker password did NOT work because it was single digit.
I guess their system doesn't support single character passes, but their web interface allowed me to create it anyways

[dosboss]

My new worker password did NOT work because it was single digit.
I guess their system doesn't support single character passes, but their web interface allowed me to create it anyways

Yeah, I noticed that when I first set up too. I was wondering why there was a password anyway, so I used "1." Then I couldn't connect.. had to create a new worker. :/

[Veldy]

bug report Solved:  Newly created worker password does NOT work, all older worker passwords are interchangeable.

Let me explain the situation in details:
(the following accounts/pass are all FAKE so plz don't try )

Account = "Guild"
worker1 = AMD; pass = amd
worker2 = Nvidia; pass = nvidia

Everything works fine except I can use either password for both workers:
BUG:  using Guild_AMD pass: nvidia ALSO works
        using Guild_Nvidia pass: amd works as well

Now I have created 3 more New workers named 1 2 & 3:

Guild_1, pass: 1  (not working)
Guild_2, pass: 2  (not working)
Guild_3, pass: 3  (not working)

But, using my old worker password "amd" or "nvidia" WORKS for all 3 new workers.

Intentional or bug? 

Probably an SQL query defect if I had to make an educated guess; the first place I would look without knowing anything about the code and database beyond the use of MySQL

Really though, does it matter if the password is swapped?  As long as the worker usename sends shares and stats to the correct worker on the site, it really doesn't matter   Nobody can do anything with this other than mine for you and give you free coins in the process and they won't know your worker names anyway unless they are sniffing the packet stream [since this is sent in the clear] and in that case the password can be picked out anyway with no worse result.

Having said that, I am sure he will fix this, just because he knows about it nobody likes a known defect [harmless or not] in their application(s)

EDIT:  Oops, I missed the case for your three new workers.  Out of curiosity, did you delete the two original workers?  In that case my suggestion about SQL query issue may be correct, but harmless clearly is not.

[anon2012]

I keep getting the error message "Your account update was not made due to submitting invalid security token. This may be caused by navigating the site in another window or different tab. Please try again." when I try to adjust my donation amount.

[Veldy]

I keep getting the error message "Your account update was not made due to submitting invalid security token. This may be caused by navigating the site in another window or different tab. Please try again." when I try to adjust my donation amount.

Log out.  Purge all cookies from the site [or all period] in your browser and your temporary cache in the browser as well.  For good measure, close and reopen your browser.  I suspect you will be fine after that. 

[Allenssmart]

still getting LOTS of miner idles. ~20% of all my blocks are idle. Works perfect if I use something else (bitcoins.lc)

anyone know why?

[CubedRoot]

Same here. I get a metric crap ton of Idles and LP pushes so I had to move to another pool.  I check BTCGuild every now and again, but its the same everytime.

[Dyaheon]

EU server has been working great for me at least.

Awesome work on this pool, it's nice to have a server close by. Only 1% stales now too.

Edit: Uh oh, just now I started getting random disconnects on some of my miners.

[Lumpy]

I talked to another user on IRC that had some similar network issues. It turns out that when he dropped his Phoenix AGGRESSION from 14 to 12 it fixed it. Myself, I found that my miners (all 5830's) won't even connect to any network if aggression is > 12. No idea why. On my Linux computers I get better performance with aggression=10 vs. anything higher anyway. Just something to try if you run Phoenix.

[Allenssmart]

but im using polclbm

[BitMinerN8]

I talked to another user on IRC that had some similar network issues. It turns out that when he dropped his Phoenix AGGRESSION from 14 to 12 it fixed it. Myself, I found that my miners (all 5830's) won't even connect to any network if aggression is > 12. No idea why. On my Linux computers I get better performance with aggression=10 vs. anything higher anyway. Just something to try if you run Phoenix.

This fixed my problem too. I don't know about idles on poclmb though, I stopped using it because with Phoenix/phatk I got 10-20 more Mhash/s, do that times 12 GPU and it's like adding a free GPU. 

Using:
-k phatk PLATFORM=0 DEVICE=0 VECTORS BFI_INT FASTLOOP=false WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=12

[Veldy]

still getting LOTS of miner idles. ~20% of all my blocks are idle. Works perfect if I use something else (bitcoins.lc)

anyone know why?

Do some network analysis between you and the pool you are connected too.  I have posted in the forums (probably deepbit thread) how to do some basic analysis if you don't know how.  Perhaps one of pool servers is giving you trouble via network problems between you and them and you can point to one of the other severs for a little while if it works better for you.

[Veldy]

EU server has been working great for me at least.

Awesome work on this pool, it's nice to have a server close by. Only 1% stales now too.

Edit: Uh oh, just now I started getting random disconnects on some of my miners.

BTC Guild has become extremely popular.  I have a hunch that another server is found to be required before long (hint Minneapolis is one of the best connected cities in the United States thanks to the University of Minnesota's involvement in it and predecessor network going back 40+ years.  Chicago is known to be a good central location as well.  If not these two cities and still try to stay central, Dallas has shown to have well connected reliable hosting a well.  Just thinking out loud

[IlbiStarz]

Gratz to BTC Guild!!

We hit 1THash/s!!!

Thanks for all your hard work Eleuthria