Accepted Ratio Issue and Efficiency

[alchemists]

Hi Steve,

I've been using your pool in Pilot mode for two months, and love it !!!
Now we have 100 miners, and about 400 on the way.

I have connected all 100 of our miners to your pool, but recently, we are seeing a massive drop in ACCEPTED rate. Almost 20% rejects !!!
That is very LARGE. I'm a network engineer myself and have tested everything:

1. Latency ==> near ZERO (I have FIBER, Symmetrical at 100 up and 100 down, burstable to 1G)
2. Ping is under 10 seconds to the URL. (Note I have 35 seconds to LitecoinPool, with 99.6% acceptance across all 100 miners)
3. I've tested my hash even to some other pools, with MUCH HIGHER time, and I still get 98% acceptance.

Could you please tell me if there is some issue on your side, and if you are planning on resolving it?
We love your interface and simplicity, and would love to remain at the near 99% ratio.

Sincerely,
Alchemists

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi Steve,

I've been using your pool in Pilot mode for two months, and love it !!!
Now we have 100 miners, and about 400 on the way.

I have connected all 100 of our miners to your pool, but recently, we are seeing a massive drop in ACCEPTED rate. Almost 20% rejects !!!
That is very LARGE. I'm a network engineer myself and have tested everything:

1. Latency ==> near ZERO (I have FIBER, Symmetrical at 100 up and 100 down, burstable to 1G)
2. Ping is under 10 seconds to the URL. (Note I have 35 seconds to LitecoinPool, with 99.6% acceptance across all 100 miners)
3. I've tested my hash even to some other pools, with MUCH HIGHER time, and I still get 98% acceptance.

Could you please tell me if there is some issue on your side, and if you are planning on resolving it?
We love your interface and simplicity, and would love to remain at the near 99% ratio.

Sincerely,
Alchemists

The cause of this issue is that the CPUs on the mining servers are overloaded, and can't process work restarts in real time. That's because the number of customers increased dramatically recently.

A period of downtime has been scheduled for Thursday evening to resolve the issue. Chris will be traveling to the datacenter to assist with the fiber installation, and on the day before he will install new hardware to double the number of mining servers available.

[alchemists]

Hi Steve,

Thank you for the quick response, and really truly appreciate your guys' efforts on this.

Cheers

[alchemists]

PS: Do you have any special arrangements and price points for larger customers? We are growing fast.

[mycide]

Hi Steve,

I've been using your pool in Pilot mode for two months, and love it !!!
Now we have 100 miners, and about 400 on the way.

I have connected all 100 of our miners to your pool, but recently, we are seeing a massive drop in ACCEPTED rate. Almost 20% rejects !!!
That is very LARGE. I'm a network engineer myself and have tested everything:

1. Latency ==> near ZERO (I have FIBER, Symmetrical at 100 up and 100 down, burstable to 1G)
2. Ping is under 10 seconds to the URL. (Note I have 35 seconds to LitecoinPool, with 99.6% acceptance across all 100 miners)
3. I've tested my hash even to some other pools, with MUCH HIGHER time, and I still get 98% acceptance.

Could you please tell me if there is some issue on your side, and if you are planning on resolving it?
We love your interface and simplicity, and would love to remain at the near 99% ratio.

Sincerely,
Alchemists

The cause of this issue is that the CPUs on the mining servers are overloaded, and can't process work restarts in real time. That's because the number of customers increased dramatically recently.

A period of downtime has been scheduled for Thursday evening to resolve the issue. Chris will be traveling to the datacenter to assist with the fiber installation, and on the day before he will install new hardware to double the number of mining servers available.

Sounds impressive so your saying servers are now overloaded, two days ago you told me pool ran at 97%? Connection issue is on my end, when it clearly is not.

[Steve Sokolowski]

PS: Do you have any special arrangements and price points for larger customers? We are growing fast.

We've considered that, but right now I think we want to keep our fee structure simple. We might investigate volume discounts once we have made all possible optimizations, but the reason we don't usually do that now is because we can make everyone more money by investing in things like the connection and in solving the "low luck miners" problem. If we lower fees by 1%, that means we have about 33% less to invest in low luck miner detection, a feature which is on the way to improving profit by 11%.

Hopefully this helps explain why we operate the way we do. For a litecoin-only pool, the amount of possible income is set, but with other coins in the mix it's possible to increase profits through investment.

[alchemists]

PS: Do you have any special arrangements and price points for larger customers? We are growing fast.

We've considered that, but right now I think we want to keep our fee structure simple. We might investigate volume discounts once we have made all possible optimizations, but the reason we don't usually do that now is because we can make everyone more money by investing in things like the connection and in solving the "low luck miners" problem. If we lower fees by 1%, that means we have about 33% less to invest in low luck miner detection, a feature which is on the way to improving profit by 11%.

Hopefully this helps explain why we operate the way we do. For a litecoin-only pool, the amount of possible income is set, but with other coins in the mix it's possible to increase profits through investment.

Perfect !!! Hey let me know if I can assist anyway.. we are a group of serious engineers and do a lot of DataCenter projects.