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

[warsmith]

I lost several hours of mining because your servers went down

Same :/

[1713490443]

1713490443

[1713490443]

1713490443

[TurdHurdur]

I lost several hours of mining because your servers went down

You have no fallback code to handle such situations?

[REF]

hey eleuthria i sent you a PM. Hoping you can answer it.

[Bitonetta]

I don't know what's going on but the last 12 hours my workers have been getting idle messages, disconnect and rejected messages from btcguild.  They'll eventually reconnect and get some shares in.  But total GHash/sec is about 1/2 of what it normally does on the web page.  I know there was issues yesterday with uk server going down.  I've always used used ubuntu with hashkill and phoenix on useast.

It doesn't show any signs of improvement since yesterday.  I need to look for another pool at this rate.

[eleuthria]

Backup EU server is coming online in the next few hours.

[zimpixa]

Servers are trully overloaded (nl.btcguild.com at least). Any idea whats going on with uk one? Its disabled rather long.

[Lumpy]

I lost several hours of mining because your servers went down

Regardless of which pool you are in, you should always set up backup miners. I love that BTC Guild has multiple servers because then my backups can be on BTC Guild itself! In my case, I had each card hashing on UK and NL, so when UK went down, they automatically switched full-speed to NL. Also, if one server has idle issues, the other worker picks up the slack.

This is quite easy to do. You simply start two workers per device. You can prioritize them if you wish with poclbm/-f or Phoenix/AGGRESSION. I have mine running on Phoenix with equal aggressions, so it splits 50/50. On the other hand, the frames trick for poclbm will allow you to give one pool 99%+ of your hashes and another pool < 1%. If Pool A goes down, Pool B gets 100%.

Even the biggest pool has had connection errors, DDoS, and other problems, so the responsibility is on you to prepare things wisely on your end so that everything is smooth and automated. And the pool operators will do everything they can as well, of course.

For me, especially since I didn't have any real downtime, our recent luck more than makes up for any complaints:

Luck in past 24 hours       724013 shares   (+21.2%)

[zimpixa]

Much much connection problems for last hour, speed went down by almost half.

[Veldy]

Much much connection problems for last hour, speed went down by almost half.

My stales went up about 0.5% overnight, otherwise no problems pointing to btcguild.com (not a specific server).  I moved to another pool temporarily only to lighten the load which might help others who are having difficulty or not actively attending their mining.  I'll switch back when the dust settles, even though it was working pretty well for me.  I think people should consider avoiding mining from specific servers if at all possible and just use the load balanced btcguild.com address.

[zimpixa]

I was pointed to eu.btcguild.com, which only gave me downtime of like 6h, dunno why it didnt switched to other eu server.

Backup EU server is up - how long will it work? And will all miners pointed there change to uk when its back?

[gentakin]

I think people should consider avoiding mining from specific servers if at all possible and just use the load balanced btcguild.com address.

There is no load balancing. btcguild.com => US central server, AFAIK.

[Lumpy]

There is no load balancing. btcguild.com => US central server, AFAIK.

Exactly. In fact, for several days there was a message on the main BTC Guild page saying NOT to use btcguild.com as US Central was overloaded.

[eleuthria]

UK server replaced by NL2 server.  btcguild.com, uk.btcguild.com and the old eu.btcguild.com are now all pointed at NL2 to get the load off of US Central/NL1.

[hugolp]

UK server replaced by NL2 server.  btcguild.com, uk.btcguild.com and the old eu.btcguild.com are now all pointed at NL2 to get the load off of US Central/NL1.

I have switched my miners towards nl2 to get load out of the others. Now the Last Share stat does not work. It shows always 1s. The Shares (Stale) stats seems to be working.

[no_alone]

what was the crush to the uk server?

[kodess]

what was the crush to the uk server?

Im guessing the 500 GHash increase...

[Veldy]

There is no load balancing. btcguild.com => US central server, AFAIK.

Exactly. In fact, for several days there was a message on the main BTC Guild page saying NOT to use btcguild.com as US Central was overloaded.

It was setup to do "round robin" load balancing [presumably passing out an address to the least loaded server ... not sure if it had any intelligence to know which servers could handle more load than others].  I remember the message about it pointing to central.  I haven't seen it on the site recently though, so I assumed it was back to doing what it should be.  Either way, Central has always been the best for me anyway.

[Veldy]

UK server replaced by NL2 server.  btcguild.com, uk.btcguild.com and the old eu.btcguild.com are now all pointed at NL2 to get the load off of US Central/NL1.

Why did you shut DNS load balancing off?  Was it doing it purely on a connection basis [thus servers that were less capable than others were getting too much traffic]?  I think each server could have a service interface available to respond about the percentage of total capacity and that could be used for the DNS load balancing.  I have never been fond of DNS load balancing in general since a lot of software will believe there are no connections to a server that has actually gone down [but the machine is responsive] and start directing all traffic at it.  In your case though, I am not sure there is much of a better way.  Perhaps a dedicated service that does nothing but smartly resolve DNS queries and include worker/account information [to keep all workers for a given user pointed at the same pool server .. a bit of caching no doubt] and it does nothing else, it could be reactive to outages.  Maybe then, you make the IP address of all the servers private and if individuals have issues with being directed to a server that is giving them issues, they could have a UI option to "prefer" a specific server.  Granted, people can figure out the IP they are attaching too, but that is not much use if you do maintenance and change the address for whatever reason [which I suspect isn't that uncommon based on Deepbit].  That would give you the ability to remove a server from the balancer and then take it offline for maintenance or whatever and then bring it back up.  It would also allow the service to detect when a server has gone dark and direct traffic elsewhere [hopefully mining software will resolve the name again rather than use the resolved IP if it gets the infamous "RPC Server Not Responding"].   The only problem I see with such a setup is that your balancer would have to poll the servers with some frequency, probably not a big problem, but removing a server from the pool seems to require you to restart all the servers push pool services [i.e. a drawback of that software I think].

So, a question, with some ideas, and ... whatever you care to take or leave .  I never have worked on a system that is handling so many requests from multiple servers all over the world and trying to centralized the core pool work [like a massive cluster] in one location, although the hub and spoke scenario (server centric) is an old one in client server development and doesn't apply to your case.  Plenty of distributed computing for retail and health, but nothing with the number of connections you are taking [although the server resources per connection used with enterprise application servers are typically much larger than getworks ... RPC+LP ].

[kodess]

There is no load balancing. btcguild.com => US central server, AFAIK.

Exactly. In fact, for several days there was a message on the main BTC Guild page saying NOT to use btcguild.com as US Central was overloaded.

It was setup to do "round robin" load balancing [presumably passing out an address to the least loaded server ... not sure if it had any intelligence to know which servers could handle more load than others].  I remember the message about it pointing to central.  I haven't seen it on the site recently though, so I assumed it was back to doing what it should be.  Either way, Central has always been the best for me anyway.

He turned it off because it couldnt handle the connections.

[kodess]

eleuthria, please put the serverload in some kind of API
I don't want to manually switch servers for my miners.

Or you somehow fix the balancing