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

[Xephan]

Everything is back to normal.  The error on the website was a known issue (which is why I was restarting it every 24 hours as a temporary fix), and everything is caught up.  Luck has continued to swing in our favor the last few days.  Funny how random numbers seem to be...random?

Admit it, you broke ze site while injecting fake blocks to bring ze luck number up after ze complaints!

j/k of course

[1713923882]

1713923882

[1713923882]

1713923882

[sharky112065]

Guess I will just keep posting this until I get an answer.

Eleuthria: I just switched back to BTC Guild. Why do I get a lot of "Warning: work queue empty, miner is idle" messages? I haven't been getting those messages on Deepbit. I'm using the same exact miner starup settings that I use for Deepbit.

[eleuthria]

Guess I will just keep posting this until I get an answer.

Eleuthria: I just switched back to BTC Guild. Why do I get a lot of "Warning: work queue empty, miner is idle" messages? I haven't been getting those messages on Deepbit. I'm using the same exact miner starup settings that I use for Deepbit.

Sounds like a routing issue between you and the server.  While I couldn't monitor them in the last 18 hours on my own miners, the last 3 hours have had 0 idles on my workers, on both US West and US Central.

Unless by "a lot" you mean one every couple of HOURS, in which case there's nothing that can be done.  Idles are caused by the flood of getwork/traffic requests that hit the servers after a long poll.  When they do hit, they tend to last less than 10 seconds.  So far they haven't shown up on my miners outside of when my personal connection was starting to fail.

Have you tried changing from west to central, or vice versa?

[sharky112065]

Guess I will just keep posting this until I get an answer.

Eleuthria: I just switched back to BTC Guild. Why do I get a lot of "Warning: work queue empty, miner is idle" messages? I haven't been getting those messages on Deepbit. I'm using the same exact miner starup settings that I use for Deepbit.

Sounds like a routing issue between you and the server.  While I couldn't monitor them in the last 18 hours on my own miners, the last 3 hours have had 0 idles on my workers, on both US West and US Central.

Unless by "a lot" you mean one every couple of HOURS, in which case there's nothing that can be done.  Idles are caused by the flood of getwork/traffic requests that hit the servers after a long poll.  When they do hit, they tend to last less than 10 seconds.  So far they haven't shown up on my miners outside of when my personal connection was starting to fail.

Have you tried changing from west to central, or vice versa?

Doesn't seem to be a routing issue between me and uscentral. I get zero packet loss when I mtr uscentral.btcguild.com. and on Deepbit where I have to hop all the way to Europe I do not get the warning messages.

It happens directly after I get "LP: New work pushed".

Doesn't seem to give me an idle for every miner that shows the LP message, but I do get 1 or two idles every batch of LP messages.

I don't understand why nothing can be done. I do not get this issue when on Deepbit. The fact that it does not happen on Deepbit tells me that something could be done about it.

I am at less then my projected BTC per 24 hours on BTC Guild right now even with +32 % luck in 24 hrs, so I'm wondering if this has something to do with it.

Coming out at less than projected when in a positive luck swing is why I keep gravitating back to Deepbit. I really like BTC Guild and the way you set up the web page and want to be here, but I also at least want to make projected when in positive luck swings.

[eleuthria]

If you're getting idles frequently enough to make your 24h rewards less than projected (ie 0% luck), even during a period of positive luck, the problem is on your end.  Try moving to US West.  There is absolutely no way idles are eating up 30% of your mining time due to a problem on our end.  It would be hitting everybody equally, not just you.

[Coolhwip]

Looks like the "known issue" with the stats is back again. All workers are showing 0 MH/s

[dyngnosis]

And now the webserver is down again...                   

[epdp14]

And now the webserver is down again...                   

its up for me. Payout worked as well.

[eleuthria]

And now the webserver is down again...                    

It was down for maybe...3 seconds?  I'd recommend holding your breath for 5 seconds and hitting refresh before running to the forum.

[sharky112065]

If you're getting idles frequently enough to make your 24h rewards less than projected (ie 0% luck), even during a period of positive luck, the problem is on your end.  Try moving to US West.  There is absolutely no way idles are eating up 30% of your mining time due to a problem on our end.  It would be hitting everybody equally, not just you.

My BTC has gone up. I forgot to account for 1 hour delay.

Anyway. Regardless of how many BTC I am getting.

I would like to see the idle messages go away. I get them on uswest as well. The fact that I get no packet loss and can hop all the way to Europe and not get but a few idle messages in a day tells me it is something server side.

I'm not saying the idles are slowing me down, could be purely cosmetic in nature as in something server side is causing the message to pop up, but it is not really idle.  I don't know, I'm just frustrated. I don't like seeing warnings popping up when I know it works fine somewhere else with the same hardware and same software setup.

[eleuthria]

sharky:  All I can say is it's nothing I can do to fix it.  When idles do pop up, its because pushpool/bitcoind are generating a ton of work after an LP.  Normally an idle only shows up when two blocks are found rapidly on the network, and two long polls go out less than a minute apart.  Even in those cases, they normally don't show up.  Like I said, I have 4 miners split 2 per server, and have not had one idle today.

If you're getting them regularly, all I can say is go elsewhere.  I can't fix a problem that seems to be only be affecting you.  If the problem was with our servers at least 1/8th the users would be experiencing it, since the pools are roughly split up to be 1/8th the total load per internal server.

[sharky112065]

sharky:  All I can say is it's nothing I can do to fix it.  When idles do pop up, its because pushpool/bitcoind are generating a ton of work after an LP.  Normally an idle only shows up when two blocks are found rapidly on the network, and two long polls go out less than a minute apart.  Even in those cases, they normally don't show up.  Like I said, I have 4 miners split 2 per server, and have not had one idle today.

If you're getting them regularly, all I can say is go elsewhere.  I can't fix a problem that seems to be only be affecting you.  If the problem was with our servers at least 1/8th the users would be experiencing it, since the pools are roughly split up to be 1/8th the total load per internal server.

Ok, well thanks for trying to help anyway. I went back to Deepbit (elswhere) as you suggested and I now have no idles.

No difference in software, hardware, or settings other than different url , login id, and password.

Because of this you have not convinced me that it is on my end. And I do not believe that none of your other users are not having this same issue.

Edit:

I am using Guiminer dated 2011-07-01

Phoenix modified as follows for the extra 3% hash.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
"I just tried this and got >3% improvement in mining speed. On my 6870, I was getting 299 MHash/sec, and now I'm getting 308 or so. The change is simple enough for anyone to do it - you don't need to be a programmer to use it.

You can go to phatk's kernel.cl file (don't worry, it just sits there in the open, no need to recompile anything), find this line
  #define Ma(x, y, z) amd_bytealign((y), (x | z), (z & x))
and change it to this line
  #define Ma(x, y, z) amd_bytealign( (z^x), (y), (x) )
Once you've done it, restart the miner."
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Using the following:

VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=11 WORKSIZE=128 FASTLOOP=OFF -k phatk

Worksize is 128 on my 6970's and 256 on my 5870's @ 300 mem.

If anyone knows what I can do to modify the Phatk kernel so I do not get the idles on BTC Guild please let me know. As stated before I do not get idles on Deepbit with the same setup.
I don't want to use Poclbm as I get a lower hash rate.

My stale rate is extremely low on both Btc Guild and Deepbit. In fact it is lower at BTC Guild than at Deepbit.

[Druas]

Because of this you have not convinced me that it is on my end. And I do not believe that none of your other users are not having this same issue.

Maybe he should just keep posting it until you do. Your way of communicating is entertaining.

[sharky112065]

Because of this you have not convinced me that it is on my end. And I do not believe that none of your other users are not having this same issue.

Maybe he should just keep posting it until you do. Your way of communicating is entertaining.

That was not helpful, but glad I could entertain you.

[eleuthria]

The bitcoin gods really don't want us to get our 2000th block .

[fcmatt]

deepbit just had a 10+ million share block too... so we just beat that easily.

2h 18m         10339261

we can only hope that after this is solved.. we get several sub 1 hour blocks solved to make up for it.


oh. btw.. when a long block like this is attempting to be overcome.. when it is solved do we still have a delay
in stats? Like we may have already solved it but now we are just waiting for it to show up?

[jasonk]

12 million shares for this block and counting!  When does it end!!! 

[kernelpanic]

I built a rudimentary Google App that pulls JSON API data from BTC Guild and dumps it into a spreadsheet.  It presents the same data as the BTC Guild My Account page as well as some additional calculated fields (and with the data in the spreadsheet, additional calculations, charts, etc can be easily added).  It also provides alerts for idle workers and if the user defined stale share percentage threshold is exceeded.  It can be run on demand and/or automatically at scheduled intervals.  The format is optimized to be viewed on your smartphone, but it can be viewed on larger screens as well.

The existing app code could also be used as the basis to build other apps that utilize the API data.  As I alluded to above, the code isn't optimized or elegant (I'm not a programmer) but it seems to be functional and I plan to enhance it further.

So I am looking for one or two people that would like to test this before I publicly post it.  I'll provide you with a URL to generate your own copy under your Google Apps account (it's free).  You'll enter your API key on your private copy, set your stale threshold and update interval and off you go.  I just ask that you provide feedback to me on your experience.

Thanks

[eleuthria]

12 million shares for this block and counting!  When does it end!!! 

It ended with a record breaker (for BTC Guild, I would bet someone out there has a higher one though).  Happy Block #2000 all.  Now lets not get stuck on one like that again.

[hugolp]

If anyone knows what I can do to modify the Phatk kernel so I do not get the idles on BTC Guild please let me know.

Im using the modified phatk kernel, the last version adequate for poclbm, connected to uswest. Have no idles, last glitch was 15 hours ago and previously I went without any glitch for more 2-3 days.

Eleuthria: Have you changed the level of difficulty of the work you send to the miners? The miners speed (Mh/s) is fine and always around the real speed, but I am seeing more and more the last share over one minute, when previously it did almost never happened.