Status as of Monday, November 6, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• As promised, Chris experimented last night and disabled 56 low-difficulty coins. They reduced profitability by a few tenths of a percent, but increased performance enough that stale rates will more than make up for that. In the future, of course, we want to have enough capacity to handle all coins, but this change will get us through Tuesday's announcement.
• The yearly system maintenance on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving this year will be much larger than initially thought. Chris spent almost 0.7 in processors, memory, servers, battery backups, and power equipment to allow for SHA-256 and Ethereum mining in the future. While the mining server is software limited, not hardware-limited, these upgrades will increase the performance of other parts of the system and provide capacity for future features. In addition to the installation of all this hardware, Chris will also be upgrading Postgres to version 10, which has additional parallelism, and will be upgrading Debian to version 9 where possible. We anticipate an all-day outage on November 21. All systems - including the forums, website, mining server, block explorers, and everything else - will be offline that day.
• Feel free to comment on the reduced bandwidth in the "live worker status" charts and report any bugs you might discover. In addition to reducing bandwidth, the changes will allow a future coin-assigner service to subscribe to the worker statuses and make decisions in parallel to other assigners.

[skinner]

Would you advice us to change our main pool for the day to minimise restarts? Will the shutdown and startup be relatively smooth?

Has the downtime and restarts from today had anything to do with the planned upgrades?

Thanks