Status as of Sunday, November 13, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi!

• Until Thanksgiving, we'll be focusing on invisible improvements that are necessary to parallelize the mining server. One of these is publishing pricing data over WAMP. When we have multiple mining servers, they can't all call the exchanges directly for price data, because many exchanges have rate limits. Instead, we need to have the price data obtained once and sent over WAMP for the servers to listen to.
• But the PHP Thruway WAMP library doesn't support PHP 5.5, which we were using, and the Debian 6 virtual machine on which it was updating hadn't had security updates in 3 years. Therefore, we needed to upgrade to Debian 9, compile PHP 7.1 with pthreads, and upgrade all the PHP projects the other backend stuff used to compatible versions, like PHPMailer. Chris and I completed this task today and the backend services are now running the existing code with small changes to make it compatible with the new version. After we've certified that this runs successfully for 24 hours, I'll then be able to start development on the new pricing system.
• We plan to issue a mining server release that will do something similar, this time with new block notifications. The coin daemons need to notify the mining servers when a new block is found, but there's no way to easily specify how many servers are running and where they are running. Modifying the daemons so that they send block notifications over WAMP instead of directly connecting to the mining server greatly simplifies this problem. There will be no changes to miners, but we will observe the server to catch bugs in the singlethreaded server first, to reduce the amount of code changed later.
• The DASH developers worked with Chris to resolve the disconnects the pool was having with the DASH network. The problem was that the older version of the DASH daemon refused to provide block templates when there weren't enough masternode connections. They released a new version that does not have this limitation, so profitability for x11 should increase. Chris examined the effect of the change and found that we've recently climbed to 14% of the DASH hashrate as a result.

[micca410evo]

Sounds good, keep up the good work!

[meinerkey]

That last item is of serious interest to me, thank you. I moved a couple D3's over here immediately following that post above, and we'll see how it goes for X11 mining now. By the way, Steve, did you know that a DASH payout from 5am this morning is still not processed, 13 hours later? Can you double-check the DASH situation? Thank you!

[VanessaE]

Steve, do you have an ETA on when the power usage graph will be fixed? It still shows figures 1/20 what they ought to be. And when (if at all) the minimum share difficulty will be lowered again? My miners were much happier at 512 than at this dynamic 16-32k range. Also note that your "help" page still lists a minimum of 512.