IMPORTANT: system-wide outage for database upgrade starting 3pm EDT October 17

[Steve Sokolowski]

Updated: this downtime has been scheduled to begin at 3pm EDT on October 17, and conclude at 3am EDT on October 18.

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In order to continue providing great service to miners, and because we expect a significant increase in hashrate next week, we plan to upgrade our PostgreSQL database from version 9.5 to the current version (9.6). Version 9.6 focuses its improvements on parallelization and performance enhancements, which will increase stability in the future as we roll out multiple algorithms.

The database outage will require no more than twelve hours of downtime, most of which will involve converting the 1.1TB of data in our database. At the same time, Chris will upgrade this forums server to a solid state disk, so that it renders pages more quickly, and also move around coin daemons to eliminate the intermittent payout address errors and provide for 10% more coin capacity.

To prepare for the downtime, we advise that you add a backup pool to your mining software. Doing so will fail over to the backup pool and then return your miners here automatically once the downtime ends.

Chris will conduct the maintenance overnight sometime early next week. We'll provide an exact date here and on the Twitter feed once it is known. Feel free to post questions or comments and we'll be happy to answer them. Thank you for your understanding!

[excelerator]

Given the impact of the imminent deployment of A4s WW, you may to provide your insight and guidance on the upcoming impact on earnings for ALL mining pools. I'm not seeing any real commercial uptake for scrypt coins that would increase demand (price) for these coins beyond just speculation so the inevitability of supply and demand becomes more apparent as more hashrate is thrown on the network.

I believe that as the hashrate increases and returns diminish, people will turn to other mining pools in a vain attempt to increase returns which will largely be a waste of their time as the drag of difficulty just follows them.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Given the impact of the imminent deployment of A4s WW, you may to provide your insight and guidance on the upcoming impact on earnings for ALL mining pools. I'm not seeing any real commercial uptake for scrypt coins that would increase demand (price) for these coins beyond just speculation so the inevitability of supply and demand becomes more apparent as more hashrate is thrown on the network.

I believe that as the hashrate increases and returns diminish, people will turn to other mining pools in a vain attempt to increase returns which will largely be a waste of their time as the drag of difficulty just follows them.

I do think that people will be disappointed with the increase in hashrate. We certainly plan to push for changes in Litecoin management once hashrate begins to increase. If Bitcoin isn't going to fork to an unlimited blocksize, there's no reason we can't push for Litecoin to do so instead and try to take the lead.

[excelerator]

*****

[GenTarkin]

Wheres news of this hashrate increase.... how many A4's? .... and whomever is buying them is retarded as hell LOL!

[CritterDog]

Given the impact of the imminent deployment of A4s WW, you may to provide your insight and guidance on the upcoming impact on earnings for ALL mining pools. I'm not seeing any real commercial uptake for scrypt coins that would increase demand (price) for these coins beyond just speculation so the inevitability of supply and demand becomes more apparent as more hashrate is thrown on the network.

I believe that as the hashrate increases and returns diminish, people will turn to other mining pools in a vain attempt to increase returns which will largely be a waste of their time as the drag of difficulty just follows them.

I do think that people will be disappointed with the increase in hashrate. We certainly plan to push for changes in Litecoin management once hashrate begins to increase. If Bitcoin isn't going to fork to an unlimited blocksize, there's no reason we can't push for Litecoin to do so instead and try to take the lead.

The A4 chips are here now! China has the A4 chips and is building there own miners. Wait time is about 3 weeks is what I was told
http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/13.html

[Steve Sokolowski]

This downtime for the database upgrade has been scheduled to begin on October 17 at 3pm EDT and will last about 12 hours. It could take shorter or longer.

There was some question as to whether Chris would go on travel to the datacenter to install more equipment, and do everything at once. We decided to hold off on purchasing more PCs for hosting X11 daemons until Christmas, because we do not expect to be finished multiple algorithms until then anyway and prices for computing equipment will decline. We will schedule additional downtime between December 26 and 30 to prepare for multiple algorithms at a later date.

Chris will try to execute payouts later that day, but payouts for money earned between midnight and 3pm EDT on October 17 may be delayed one day until October 19.

[excelerator]

Looks like you started a few hours early, but all my servers failed over nicely to the backup pool just shy of 2:00pm PDT.

Good luck with the upgrade!

[Chris Sokolowski]

The upgrade is progressing nicely. I have already completed the database upgrade, but due to disk space limitations, I had to copy the database to a temporary hard disk first before performing the upgrade operations. I am performing the final step of moving the database back from the temporary hard drive to the array of solid state disks. As soon as the 1.1TB is copied back, then I can restart everything.

[Steve Sokolowski]

This outage is now over, and the system is ready to handle increased hashrate later in the week. Thanks for your patience!