Status as of Saturday, September 9, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• I spent about four hours yesterday simply staring at the screen and thinking to see if there was some way I hadn't thought of to improve coin assignment. I was able to come up with an idea. Whereas we previously evaluated all miners for new coins when a coin changed positions in the list, I was able to work out a proof that the same result can be obtained by evaluating only the miners who were mining the now stale block on that coin, and then the currently least-profitable assigned miners until the changed coin is overassigned, and then stop.
• I implemented this change and am testing it, but it will be almost impossible to get a true sense of what performance difference this change makes until it is deployed to production. I'm confident it won't crash the mining server, but this is one of those problems that can't be tested in development because a large number of miners is needed. We'll release this afternoon and then monitor to see that the behavior hasn't changed. Once that is proven, then we can analyze CPU usage. Theoretically, this change should cut CPU usage dramatically during most times, but I'm not sure whether it will fix the stale shares issue or not because that happens when every miner needs to be reassigned at once.
• The number of support requests is the lowest it has been in months, at 75. I closed another 7 this morning.
• We are still not yet read to announce our decision about the evaluation of the project's future that was completed a week ago. Once we can find and consult with a lawyer, we'll be able to announce.
• There were issues with share insertion yesterday. I know how to fix them but the problem is of low priority at the moment. There are also issues with live profitability numbers, which are of low priority behind the performance issues. Chris credited yesterday's surpluses to all miners, so the paid profits are higher than those reported in the charts.
• Registrations are closed and will remain closed until we can deal with mining server CPU usage and these other bugs. What continues to surprise me is that I've never seen a business before where speed in developing the technology was the problem. In the five businesses I started over the past decade, advertising to obtain customers was always the focus.
• If one reads twitter posts, it almost seems like the entire cryptocurrency industry right now is on a knife's edge. There are simply too many new customers and every site cannot improve performance and hire support personnel quickly enough to welcome them all. While I still think the Bitcoin Core is going to be the cause of the next crash with their all-out attacks on progress, their idiocy may be helping us all by holding back growth enough so that exchanges and pools can continue to accept new customers.

[micca410evo]

sounds like slight progress, keep up the good work!

[simonjbcmm]

Steve and Chris,

Thank you for all of your efforts. Your PROHASHING project is outstanding.

-Jonathon