Status as of Tuesday, October 21

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Tue Oct 21, 2014 9:37 am

Yesterday evening, there was a regression that had been introduced, which caused an exception inserting shares into the database. A failsafe triggered because the coins being mined hadn't acquired a price, and that error was not removed when a price was received later on. I fixed the issue and restarted the server around 10:30pm, which took about 2 minutes.
I was able to reduce the length of some queries down from 18s to 110us just by changing EXTRACT(epoch from [variable]) to TO_TIMESTAMP([variable]). Apparently, EXTRACT causes postgres to do a table scan of all 30M shares, whereas TO_TIMESTAMP requires just four index rows to be queried.
There is only one performance issue that could be a problem in the future left, and that's all the triggers that fire when a share is inserted. But I think I can reduce the length of that query once Chris gets the database to the development environment.
I fixed a payout issue where someone having a balance of < 0.0000001 in a coin would cause everyone not to be paid. Now, if you have such a small balance, your payout doesn't execute and everyone else still gets paid.
As a courtesy to your fellow miners, increase your difficulty using a password of d=65536 or d=[some other value] if you can. You still get paid the same, but save us CPU usage and save yourself bandwidth. For many miners (but not all), you'll get increased hashrate too.
There is a small issue with payouts for three coins where the balances are so low that we can't get the money out of Cryptsy again. When Chris tried to withdrawal the money, it was sent back to Cryptsy by the system because we didn't owe that much. I'm going to work on an automated solution to Cryptsy's withdrawal limits and hope to do that tonight. We're getting closer to having worked out most of the issues that came up with this release, and hopefully I can get back to trying more hours at merge mining soon. However, as I predicted earlier, the price of dogecoins is plummeting after the euphoria of the introduction of merge mining wore off, so our gains may be more minimal than I had hoped before.