Downtime this morning

[Steve Sokolowski]

We tried a new feature. There are a few miners who submit most of the shares on the pool. We changed things so that miners can't set their static difficulties so that they would submit more than 2 shares per second.

By contrast, the dynamic difficulties target one share per minute. This doesn't affect profitability, but will significantly reduce server load. We'll see how this works.

[vhmanu]

My static difficulty went from 15k to sometimes 500k with the new feature. 500k translates to 1-3minutes per share, not 2 per second.
Is there an error?

[FRISKIE]

I agree with blocking the IP's from NH, raising fees seems counter productive.

Do we have data to support the conclusion that NH users are pouring in a high amount of hashrate?

[glccom]

I agree with blocking the IP's from NH, raising fees seems counter productive.

Do we have data to support the conclusion that NH users are pouring in a high amount of hashrate?

I was going off of what other users had said, I don't have any proof.

[CritterDog]

I agree with blocking the IP's from NH, raising fees seems counter productive.

Do we have data to support the conclusion that NH users are pouring in a high amount of hashrate?

I would like to know this also. What is the source of the problem. Pool has been working fine and now all sudden problems? Is this from big NH orders overloading the system?

[virtuado]

It would be nice to have at least an explanation, there is a lot of discontent suddenly. I think there is lack of proper communication in this matter, no status updates, no news...nothing. One day failure is acceptable, but every day?

To be honest...i liked this format, but in the few time i've been here, to many disconections.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I agree with blocking the IP's from NH, raising fees seems counter productive.

Do we have data to support the conclusion that NH users are pouring in a high amount of hashrate?

I would like to know this also. What is the source of the problem. Pool has been working fine and now all sudden problems? Is this from big NH orders overloading the system?

I'd love to say that I could fully diagnose the problem, but I'm away for work and don't have access to the system at this time.

Chris is working as hard as he can to keep things running until Saturday, at which time I'll spend all day seeing what, if anything can be done.

[Steve Sokolowski]

My static difficulty went from 15k to sometimes 500k with the new feature. 500k translates to 1-3minutes per share, not 2 per second.
Is there an error?

The system assigns a dynamic difficulty if the static difficulty is too low, and dynamic difficulty targets about 1 minute.

However, you can slightly increase the static difficulty to make sure there aren't more than 2 shares per second, and it will never get to a dynamic difficulty, so you won't have to worry about that.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I agree with blocking the IP's from NH, raising fees seems counter productive.

Do we have data to support the conclusion that NH users are pouring in a high amount of hashrate?

I would like to know this also. What is the source of the problem. Pool has been working fine and now all sudden problems? Is this from big NH orders overloading the system?

The cause is that there are a few X11 users who occasionally connect and then rapidly submit thousands of 0.1 difficulty shares per second. I don't know if it's from Nicehash or somewhere else. We normally process about 15,000 shares per second, but these X11 spikes can bring that over 35,000 shares per second and overload the server.

Previously, the database was the limiting factor since we couldn't insert shares fast enough. But now that we've improved the database, the limitation is the mining server processing all these shares. We need to make a quick fix to reduce the number of shares, and I think that setting a cap on per-worker share submission rate has the least effect on users. When Steve reworks the mining server to handle more shares, we can relax the limitation so that it affect only the most egregious violations.

[mine_x]

.. Just want to wish you good luck and I hope you understand that the normal NH users (not the bots with 50GH+ for 5 minutes) are not the enemies of the pool - the bigger and stable hash rate means more stable and more money to all miners and pool admins too.