rjk
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1ngldh
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June 23, 2012, 05:18:19 PM |
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Processing a proof of work server-side is just like mining, isn't it? In regards to the hashing operation that takes place - it just processes specified nonces and not random ones. I haven't really thought about it until now, but for a 1Thps pool, about how many nonces does it need to validate per second? I can see how a slow CPU would be a bottleneck, and I wonder if pool software could offload that processing to a video card - otherwise faster devices will trounce 'most any pool.
I haven't run the numbers, but if we assume that a dedicated server might be able to process perhaps 10mhps in a single thread (and that might be a bit high), is that enough to deal with (perhaps several) 1Thps miners flooding it with nonces to process?
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"In a nutshell, the network works like a distributed
timestamp server, stamping the first transaction to spend a coin. It
takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but
hard to stifle." -- Satoshi
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eleuthria
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June 23, 2012, 05:54:33 PM |
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Processing a proof of work server-side is just like mining, isn't it? In regards to the hashing operation that takes place - it just processes specified nonces and not random ones. I haven't really thought about it until now, but for a 1Thps pool, about how many nonces does it need to validate per second? I can see how a slow CPU would be a bottleneck, and I wonder if pool software could offload that processing to a video card - otherwise faster devices will trounce 'most any pool.
I haven't run the numbers, but if we assume that a dedicated server might be able to process perhaps 10mhps in a single thread (and that might be a bit high), is that enough to deal with (perhaps several) 1Thps miners flooding it with nonces to process?
Yes. Because a difficulty=1 share is approximately 2^32 hashes. Pool software likely isn't using anywhere near the optimizations that mining software uses to evaluate hashes, so lets say that it can only verify ~10 KH/s worth of hashes. That means it can verify 10,000 shares per second. This is a very rough number, since no pool has ever had to verify even close to that. BTC Guild currently processes ~380,000 shares in 20 minutes, or 316 shares per second. If my 10,000/second number is accurate, that means BTC Guild could support ~31x the hash power it currently has, which is about 35 TH/s. Now in this scenario, I'm starting to think sending out higher difficulty shares would be beneficial. The likely bottleneck would be DB access time (inserting 100k rows every 10 seconds in batches with my current software setup). Historically, the biggest problems BTC Guild has had is pushing out longpoll connections quickly. When you starting having 4,000+ longpoll connections, it starts to bog things down on the server. Normally the bulk of those connections are to inefficient miners, so its very difficult to say just where the bottleneck will lie when dealing with highly efficient and very fast mining hardware. |
RIP BTC Guild, April 2011 - June 2015
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-ck (OP)
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Ruu \o/
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June 24, 2012, 04:12:29 PM |
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Well I just committed a busload of changes to cgminer to help further reduce getwork load.
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Developer/maintainer for cgminer, ckpool/ckproxy, and the -ck kernel
2% Fee Solo mining at solo.ckpool.org
-ck
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-ck (OP)
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Ruu \o/
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June 27, 2012, 11:58:59 PM |
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Is that even required? If the pool detects a high hashrate itself, wouldn't that suffice? |
Developer/maintainer for cgminer, ckpool/ckproxy, and the -ck kernel
2% Fee Solo mining at solo.ckpool.org
-ck
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Luke-Jr
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June 28, 2012, 02:46:11 AM |
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Is that even required? If the pool detects a high hashrate itself, wouldn't that suffice? With load balancing miners, the pool might detect a much slower hashrate than work is being requested for. Also, not all pools (if any) have a means for the high-level statistics like hashrate to be communicated back to the core poolserver. |
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kano
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Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
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June 28, 2012, 04:49:45 AM |
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Is that even required? If the pool detects a high hashrate itself, wouldn't that suffice? With load balancing miners, the pool might detect a much slower hashrate than work is being requested for. Also, not all pools (if any) have a means for the high-level statistics like hashrate to be communicated back to the core poolserver. But of course all pools do. Quite simply, the overall share submission rate. Since this is a rather large statistical sample, it would also be way more accurate than the numbers provided by the miner software. The miner program attempting to get the correct value is prone to all sorts of issues: How long can the pool assume the miner is mining at the rate specified - that is specifically a guess. What percentage of the hash rate is the miner providing to the pool - that is specifically a guess. How accurate is the miner in determining the hash rate - another guess. Overall - inaccurate. How accurate is the share submission rate - 100% How accurate is converting that to a Hash rate for anything but a tiny pool - extremely. Even for a single miner, over a period of a day, converting 'U:' is very accurate. |
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Koooooj
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June 28, 2012, 11:13:21 AM |
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This increase in difficulty seems interesting to me. I have a line of thought that may lead to a solutions that vastly reduces the network and processing requirements of the pool servers. I'll try to lay out my line of thought. I'm sure that I have holes and/or inaccuracies in this, so please try not to dismiss it because of a trivial problem.
As I understand it, the standard way that pooled mining works is this: the pool server looks at the present block chain, pending transactions, and a generation transaction that sends 50 coins tothat the server, and puts together the input to the bitcoin hash function. Then, miners request ranges of nonces to check. The miners compute those hashes, and respond with the ones that have a hash below a certain value (much larger than whatever it takes to mine a block). The server then looks at the shares claimed and easily computes the few hashes for the claimed shares to give credit for working. The pool knows the miner is working honestly because the shares check out ok.
What I propose is that the pool gives each miner an address to send the 50 coins to. Then, each miner makes the input to the hash function be the block chain, existing transactions, a generation block sending 50 to the MINER, and a transaction sending 50 to the pool. The pool can still check that the block is valid, and only gives credit to the miner if it is playing by those rules. With this setup, each miner has a different generation transaction, so there is no reason to partition off nonces through a centralized server. It may cause larger network demands since the full block must be communicated, not just the nonce, but I feel like it could also reduce stale shares. It also requires that the miner hassince access to the full block chain, which not all do.
Let me know what you all think. Sorry if it's a bit wordy.
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Luke-Jr
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June 28, 2012, 02:07:43 PM |
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This increase in difficulty seems interesting to me. I have a line of thought that may lead to a solutions that vastly reduces the network and processing requirements of the pool servers. I'll try to lay out my line of thought. I'm sure that I have holes and/or inaccuracies in this, so please try not to dismiss it because of a trivial problem.
As I understand it, the standard way that pooled mining works is this: the pool server looks at the present block chain, pending transactions, and a generation transaction that sends 50 coins tothat the server, and puts together the input to the bitcoin hash function. Then, miners request ranges of nonces to check. The miners compute those hashes, and respond with the ones that have a hash below a certain value (much larger than whatever it takes to mine a block). The server then looks at the shares claimed and easily computes the few hashes for the claimed shares to give credit for working. The pool knows the miner is working honestly because the shares check out ok.
What I propose is that the pool gives each miner an address to send the 50 coins to. Then, each miner makes the input to the hash function be the block chain, existing transactions, a generation block sending 50 to the MINER, and a transaction sending 50 to the pool. The pool can still check that the block is valid, and only gives credit to the miner if it is playing by those rules. With this setup, each miner has a different generation transaction, so there is no reason to partition off nonces through a centralized server. It may cause larger network demands since the full block must be communicated, not just the nonce, but I feel like it could also reduce stale shares. It also requires that the miner hassince access to the full block chain, which not all do.
Let me know what you all think. Sorry if it's a bit wordy.
BIP 0022 |
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