Status as of Wednesday, February 18

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 4:23 pm

Here's today's status:

We have a fix for the "duplicate shares" issue which we plan to release tonight. Thanks for your patience.
Our biggest problem seems to be dealing with the immense amount of data that the system generates. To get an idea of the data we need to purge beginning tonight, there are close to 500 million share records and 300 GB of data in the database. The history of coin economics data alone consists of 150 million rows. The blockchains of the 200 daemons we have installed now exceed 300GB. While the disk space required for this data is cheap, the problem is in backing everything up. Downloading the data to the backup location, which has 50Mbps download bandwidth, can take many hours. Simply compressing a database dump before backup now requires 1.75 hours.
I will be working on adding the ability to sell through an intermediate currency like litecoins this weekend.
In the first few days of running this algorithm, it seems that the new coin selection routine is performing better than the old one by far. However, the greatest benefit won't come until a large miner joins the pool, as in that case the new miner will be assigned to higher-difficulty coins without forcing the entire pool's profits down. There haven't been any big hashrate spikes recently like happened a few times last week, so this effect has yet to be demonstrated.
I'm also trying to figure out if people would prefer payouts to be paid the next day at noon, instead of 12 hours later at midnight as they happen now. I don't know whether the time spent implementing something like that would be appreciated or if it should instead be spent on other things.