October 18 Update Release Notes

[Chris Sokolowski]

The new release has proceeded successfully, and the server is back to normal operation. The main purpose of the downtime was to prepare the database for upcoming features. Now that the database upgrade is done, we do not plan to have any significant downtime in the next few months. When we have finished and tested the code for the new features, adding them will just be a matter of restarting the stratum and web servers, which will take a few minutes at most.

Release notes (October 18, 2014)


New features

Added the ability for a user to manually specify the share difficulty. To specify the desired share difficulty, use "d=xxx" in the password field where xxx is the difficulty of shares that you want your miner to submit. The allowed values are any power of 2 between 512 (2^9) and 65536 (2^16). Difficulty is set on a per-miner basis, so multiple miners on one account can each have different share difficulties.

Added the "ignore payout threshold" option. This option, available in the earnings tab, allows you to ignore the payout threshold thus sending your entire mature coin balance every time payouts are issued. If you choose to ignore the payout threshold, you will be charged the transaction fees (if any) that the coin networks charge to make the payout regardless of how much money you are paid. If you reach the payout threshold regularly, it is recommended that you do not use this option to save on transaction fees.

Major changes

Performed over 100 database changes required for the pool to support upcoming new features, updating nearly 50 million rows worth of data. The database is now ready for merge mining, multiple exchanges, and multiple coin mining. We have been working on all three of these features on our development server, and once they are complete, tested, and ready, we will only need a few minutes of downtime to deploy the new code. Depending on our rate of progress we may have merge mining as soon as a few days from now.

Performed numerous optimizations on the database to reduce the rate of share rejection, including upgrading PostgreSQL to version 9.3.


Feature changes

The automatic difficulty now has a maximum of 16384 instead of the previous 2048, which may cause your miner to perform worse than it has in the past with the pool. If your miner does not perform well with high difficulties, please set the difficulty manually using the new feature.

Added additional data to some tables. The last found blocks table now has the US dollar value of the blocks found, and share details has additional fields such as electricity cost per share instead of electricity cost per coin paid out.

The ticker at the top of the website now only updates three times a day as opposed to continuously. This was necessary to reduce server load since loading this ticker presented one of the largest strains on the database server. In the future we plan to make this ticker more granular than eight hours and to provide a chart showing the payout updated more frequently as well.

The current update times are 12:00 AM, 8:00 AM, and 4:00 PM. The result is:

Time you visit the site (EDT):---------Profitability shown in ticker is the average of (EDT):
8:00 AM - 3:59 PM---------------------12:00 AM to 7:59 AM
4:00 PM - 11:59 PM--------------------8:00 AM to 3:59 PM
12:00 AM - 8:00 AM-------------------4:00 PM to 11:59 PM (previous day)


Bug fixes

Fixed the all-time balances, which would previously only report the current day's balance. The all-time balances now will increase each day starting with today. In the future I will correct the all-time balances so that they start from when the pool first went online.

Fixed an issue where users could change their password to longer than the maximum length allowed in the login box, therefore preventing future logins. The maximum password length is now 128 characters.

Fixed a bug where Poolpicker.eu would only report the instantaneous profitability at 12:00 AM instead of the entire previous day's average profitability.

Fixed a bug where users who had multiple accounts paying to the same wallet would only have one account paid out per day.

Fixed a bug where coins would disable themselves reporting that the daemon block number differed too much from the exchange block number when they were actually on the correct chain.

Fixed a bug where coins that had many orphans in the past would become permanently disabled despite having no orphans for a number of days.

[matty990]

Chris - Love the pool and love the new manual diff ability. I feel for the pool to really shine implementing across other profitable algos such as x11/13 would be amazing. I know the dev effort would be rough but would pay dividends to not only the pool, but also your self. I know I would throw tons of hash your way if this is something you would be into.

[Chris Sokolowski]

Our Poolpicker fixes only exposed another bug on their site.

The previous issue was that Poolpicker wants the average earnings reported a day ahead. For example, the average profitability over the day of 2014-10-18 needs to be reported to them as the profitability of 2014-10-19. Now, since we have corrected for that, our site reports today's average earnings so far with tomorrow's date. At midnight, the table stops updating today's average and moves on to the next day.

We had assumed that Poolpicker would actually check the dates and exclude today's data since it is not final. Instead, Poolpicker reads all the data, ignoring the date listed, and posts it. Their code doesn't check what date is being read and shown on the front page, just assuming that whatever data is newest is the current date. That means that they already posted yesterday's earnings from 4:00PM to 12:00AM as tomorrow's average. If you look at their site, it shows us at the top because it is a day off and no one else has posted data with that date.

I'll see if we can exclude the current day's data in the information they take from our site. Until we update this, the data on their site is still not completely accurate.

The updated database also seems to have our payout code causing today's payouts to not execute. Steve is working to fix the code ASAP and will send today's payouts as soon as it is fixed.

Chris - Love the pool and love the new manual diff ability. I feel for the pool to really shine implementing across other profitable algos such as x11/13 would be amazing. I know the dev effort would be rough but would pay dividends to not only the pool, but also your self. I know I would throw tons of hash your way if this is something you would be into.

Thanks for the kind words. We want to get scrypt mining as profitable as possible before moving onto other algorithms, but we have designed our database to be able to expand to other algorithms and would like to do so in the future.

[gridseeder]

I'll add another +1. This is a really nice pool. I love all the stats, and the payouts are pretty solid. Looks like you guys are doing some great work, good things in the future for this pool for sure.
Thanks!