Chris: review bandwidth consumption

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi Chris,

I'm going to start posting messages that don't include passwords or sensitive information here. People who are interested in how a pool works can read them, and people who are not can just go to the other forums. You can reply directly to these posts. Perhaps some people will comment on them too.

Prelude just joined the pool and is submitting shares every few seconds, which provides us with a good opportunity to review bandwidth consumption by the server. His shares are at 4192 difficulty, which is the maximum of the pool. I'm thinking that we can raise that maximum pool difficulty to 32768, but in order to do that we need two things: first, we need to get our ASICs to arrive so that we can test with such high difficulties, and second, we need to see if prelude's shares actually put a load on the system or whether this is just a theoretical issue.

Use iftop to monitor bandwidth consumption by the stratum server and see if you can determine how much bandwidth is actually being used per 1Mh/s. I suspect that it is inconsequential, because stratum is a very efficient protocol.

-Steve