Changes in duplicate worker handling

[Steve Sokolowski]

We made some changes in the way that workers who use the same "n=" worker name password argument are handled.

Previously, these workers would have a random UUID appended after the specified worker name. The new name would then be displayed along with the original worker name in the customer charts and the "live mining status" boxes. Now, the workers will have an integer appended to their names. New workers will fill in the blanks, so the maximum integer will never rise above the number of connected duplicate workers.

The red error text for duplicate workers has been eliminated. Duplicate workers will not be recorded in any customer charts until they have been connected for at least 45 seconds. The second change will eliminate recording for people who only have duplicate workers due to poor Internet connectivity.

The WAMP API has been changed so that there is now information for each miner indicating whether the miner is a duplicate. This data, which is not yet documented, will allow Vance to modify the website to specially indicate duplicate miners in unobtrusive text.

All of the above changes will be available the next time the mining server to which your workers are connected crashes due to the memory issue. Half of the mining servers have already crashed and have the new features available. Since recent software updates have nearly eliminated the memory issue on the one server that has 32GB of memory available, we may actually need to manually restart those mining servers for the half of customers who are connected to the stable server. If a manual restart is necessary, there will now only be 3 seconds of downtime.

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In the future, Vance will also include a checkbox on the website to sum up duplicate worker data, when all the duplicate workers are mining the same algorithm. We learned that Mining Rig Rentals is a source of duplicate workers because the customer does not have control over how many connections Mining Rig Rentals makes to the target server, and this feature would work around that limitation. However, because we always prioritize support for direct miners over support for cloud miners, actually modifying the website to display all the API data that is now available will be a low priority task.