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

[eleuthria]

Main post and the website's "How to Connect" page have been modified to direct miners to point towards a particular pool rather than the generic "btcguild.com" .  This has been accompanied by a Server Status widget on the side, giving a simple description of the load per server.

Picking a server close to you has a minimal effect on your mining performance.  The server load has a much higher chance of affecting your performance.  If your miners have trouble with frequent idles, it is recommended you check the website server status widget and relocate your miners to a server identifying either LOW or Normal load.

The urls once again are:  uswest.btcguild.com , useast.btcguild.com , nl.btcguild.com , uk.btcguild.com


Many patches were applied to server configurations today, and it has shown a dramatic increase in overall server performance.

[BitMinerN8]

Tomorrow afternoon I will be switching pools over to difficulty 2 shares.  I will also be changing the way the pools are handled until I can work getting multiple servers in a single datacenter to do -real- load balancing (2+ pool servers behind a frontend that relays connections to the pools).

Has this "difficulty 2 shares" gone into effect?

[hugolp]

Tomorrow afternoon I will be switching pools over to difficulty 2 shares.  I will also be changing the way the pools are handled until I can work getting multiple servers in a single datacenter to do -real- load balancing (2+ pool servers behind a frontend that relays connections to the pools).

Has this "difficulty 2 shares" gone into effect?

Some hours ago I got an odd share numer so I guess it did not yet.

[bodhipraxis]

As of 2:04 AM Thurs (UTC), when I attempt to connect to "My Account" on the btcguild website, I see the error message:

"Failed to connect to US Central BTCGuild."

UPDATE: 3 minutes later, I was able to connect. Eleuthria* said that "many patches were being applied" today. Probl. the cause of this?

[eleuthria]

Tomorrow afternoon I will be switching pools over to difficulty 2 shares.  I will also be changing the way the pools are handled until I can work getting multiple servers in a single datacenter to do -real- load balancing (2+ pool servers behind a frontend that relays connections to the pools).

Has this "difficulty 2 shares" gone into effect?

Difficulty 2 patch has been delayed for now.  The goal was to get the load off the servers from pushpool receiving shares and posting them to MySQL.  Last night a fix was made to the users mysql table that dramatically dropped the CPU usage of the process.  The problem in scaling has now been narrowed down to the pushpool<->bitcoind communications.  Working on patching this ASAP before moving on to a difficulty adjustment.

[eleuthria]

US West and web server are having a small bit of downtime right now to bring up a US Central server.  US West still seems to hang for a few minutes when its bombarded by all of the new getwork requests after a brief downtime.

[tripper22]

US West and web server are having a small bit of downtime right now to bring up a US Central server.  US West still seems to hang for a few minutes when its bombarded by all of the new getwork requests after a brief downtime.

eleuthria

Thanks for all the hard work. When do you think everything will be finished? I would love to stay with BTC Guild but it's been too inconsistent.

[Lumpy]

US Central seems to be overloaded... for those of you having trouble, you should manually choose another option.

[swusc2]

**********PSA**********

Everyone Directed to btcguild.com Should Redirect Themselves to One of the Following Servers.

uswest.btcguild.com
useast.btcguild.com
uk.btcguild.com
nl.btcguild.com

Everyone directing themselves to btcguild.com is being redirect straight to uscentral.btcguild.com. This is going to cause uscentral.btcguild.com to overload

This is in your best interested to distribute yourselves out.

[Xer]

**********PSA**********

Everyone Directed to btcguild.com Should Redirect Themselves to One of the Following Servers.

uswest.btcguild.com
useast.btcguild.com
uk.btcguild.com
nl.btcguild.com

Everyone directing themselves to btcguild.com is being redirect straight to uscentral.btcguild.com. This is going to cause uscentral.btcguild.com to overload

This is in your best interested to distribute yourselves out.

Whats stopping btcguild from using round robin or some other distributing algoritm when going over? that would sovle the single server overload issue directly.
Deepbit points you to the closest server when you use their adress so it is possible to do.

Edit. everyone mining with the guiminer or other mining softwartes with hardcoded addresses would have to change miners to use those links.

[kodess]

**********PSA**********

Everyone Directed to btcguild.com Should Redirect Themselves to One of the Following Servers.

uswest.btcguild.com
useast.btcguild.com
uk.btcguild.com
nl.btcguild.com

Everyone directing themselves to btcguild.com is being redirect straight to uscentral.btcguild.com. This is going to cause uscentral.btcguild.com to overload

This is in your best interested to distribute yourselves out.

Whats stopping btcguild from using round robin or some other distributing algoritm when going over? that would sovle the single server overload issue directly.
Deepbit points you to the closest server when you use their adress so it is possible to do.

Edit. everyone mining with the guiminer or other mining softwartes with hardcoded addresses would have to change miners to use those links.

he tried round robin, it overloaded the balancer...

[hugolp]

It might be random but there is the overloading in USA central and weve been almost 4 hours without finding a block.

[disq]

**********PSA**********

This is in your best interested to distribute yourselves out.

Whats stopping btcguild from using round robin or some other distributing algoritm when going over? that would solve the single server overload issue directly.
Deepbit points you to the closest server when you use their adress so it is possible to do.

Edit. everyone mining with the guiminer or other mining softwartes with hardcoded addresses would have to change miners to use those links.

he tried round robin, it overloaded the balancer...

well, the round-robin doesn't need to be smart, he could use vanilla DNS for it without any balancer. can't control it automatically and fast though (well, unless very short TTLs are used along with some bash-fu to check availability/update the main dns record) but at least wouldn't lose mining time and the eventual hashing power drop could be avoided. (of course, port 80 needs to be redirected to the main webserver which needs to run in a subdomain, maybe 'www')

[eleuthria]

**********PSA**********

This is in your best interested to distribute yourselves out.

Whats stopping btcguild from using round robin or some other distributing algoritm when going over? that would solve the single server overload issue directly.
Deepbit points you to the closest server when you use their adress so it is possible to do.

Edit. everyone mining with the guiminer or other mining softwartes with hardcoded addresses would have to change miners to use those links.

he tried round robin, it overloaded the balancer...

well, the round-robin doesn't need to be smart, he could use vanilla DNS for it without any balancer. can't control it automatically and fast though (well, unless very short TTLs are used along with some bash-fu to check availability/update the main dns record) but at least wouldn't lose mining time and the eventual hashing power drop could be avoided. (of course, port 80 needs to be redirected to the main webserver which needs to run in a subdomain, maybe 'www')

Round robin at the DNS level does not work.  Miner clients are dumb and re-query the DNS every connection, rather than resolve the host at the start.  This causes them to bounce between servers randomly when the DNS round robin was enabled, causing work to be sent everywhere and get rejected.  To date, we've tried:
  DNS Round Robin - Tossed a miner between servers randomly, causing rejects.
  HAProxy Load Balancing - Can't handle that many connections being proxied to remote servers.
  Custom DNS Server program - DNS queries are peer-to-peer, so "sticking" a client ended up sticking a chain of DNS servers.  OpenDNS and Google DNS are distributed, so a miner was sometimes being shot to different servers based on where their DNS query was routed at the time.

The final solution, which is what most people would use is to consolidate the servers to a single data center, put a HAProxy/Pen/Pound server in front of the nodes, and have it do local load balancing.  However, this means that if you have connection problems to one server, you have them with every server.

[melanarchy]

So instead of reloading the block stats and my account pages on the site all the time I whipped up a quick python script to curl down the data from the api and display it.  It requires python and curl to be installed, I've tested it on ubuntu but there isn't a reason it wouldn't work with any other os.  For now you need to just put your API Key in the top, and if you're on a different os flavor update the #! python path and the curl path.

Here is the sample of the output:

Code:

+-+-+-+-BTC GUILD Pool Stats for XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-+-+-+-+
+ Confirmed Payout   : 0.58573323                                       +
+ Unconfirmed Payout : 0.34381127                                       +
+ Estimated Payout   : 0.02086434                                       +
+ Sum Total (inc est): 0.95040884                                       +
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
+ Total Worker Hashrate 615.61  Shares 1375  Stales 3  Stale% 0.22      +
+ Pool Average Block Time (seconds) 2825                                +
+ Latest Block Times   1:07:50 0:36:48 0:12:03 0:07:46 0:14:48 0:44:14  +
+ Pool Est Blks/24hrs   31      Miner Est 24hr Rewards : 0.61859068     +
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

https://github.com/johnmarc/BTC-Guild-Stats 

I'll likely provide some updates to allow for all sorts of extras (config files, idle warnings, etc.) as well but this is a start at least. Feel free to pm me if you have questions, and you can always submit a pull request to change the code.

[eleuthria]

This update has been pushed back far too long given how easy it is, but I finally have some time to breathe again and get to work on features .

My Account -> Rewards Summary now display how much BTC you've generated in the last 24 hours.

[smackdaddy]

This update has been pushed back far too long given how easy it is, but I finally have some time to breathe again and get to work on features .

My Account -> Rewards Summary now display how much BTC you've generated in the last 24 hours.

Nice! Very helpful, with the change in difficulties.

[Lumpy]

Worker counters reset don't seem to be working properly. Reset All seems to do nothing, and when I (later) reset an individual worker, it became 76 (3).

[eleuthria]

Worker counters reset don't seem to be working properly. Reset All seems to do nothing, and when I (later) reset an individual worker, it became 76 (3).

Fixed.  US Central shares were not sync'ing up properly when resetting shares.

[BitMinerN8]

So instead of reloading the block stats and my account pages on the site all the time I whipped up a quick python script to curl down the data from the api and display it.  It requires python and curl to be installed, I've tested it on ubuntu but there isn't a reason it wouldn't work with any other os.  For now you need to just put your API Key in the top, and if you're on a different os flavor update the #! python path and the curl path.

Here is the sample of the output:

Code:

+-+-+-+-BTC GUILD Pool Stats for XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-+-+-+-+
+ Confirmed Payout   : 0.58573323                                       +
+ Unconfirmed Payout : 0.34381127                                       +
+ Estimated Payout   : 0.02086434                                       +
+ Sum Total (inc est): 0.95040884                                       +
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
+ Total Worker Hashrate 615.61  Shares 1375  Stales 3  Stale% 0.22      +
+ Pool Average Block Time (seconds) 2825                                +
+ Latest Block Times   1:07:50 0:36:48 0:12:03 0:07:46 0:14:48 0:44:14  +
+ Pool Est Blks/24hrs   31      Miner Est 24hr Rewards : 0.61859068     +
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

https://github.com/johnmarc/BTC-Guild-Stats 

I'll likely provide some updates to allow for all sorts of extras (config files, idle warnings, etc.) as well but this is a start at least. Feel free to pm me if you have questions, and you can always submit a pull request to change the code.

Thanks, pretty cool.

For the Windows users that want to check it out I used the following:
Curl - http://www.paehl.com/open_source/?CURL_7.21.6
Python - http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.2/python-2.7.2.msi

I installed Python with default selections. Then I copied the curl.exe into C:\BTCGuild_Stats folder along with the btcguild.py file. You will need to add your API key on line 6, keep the ' on each end, and then remove the /usr/bin/ from line 9,10,11. Then just be in a command prompt in the directory and type btcguild.py