Prohashing Mining Pool Forums

What's up everybody? I have been away for a bit, went on vacation and took some time to help a few coin launches, i'm back and pointing my furries at prohashing. Hopefully I will be getting the other asic's I ordered soon and have some more hashpower to contribute. I did notice that I'm getting stratum work request restarts about every 10 seconds or so. Maybe it's coin related or it's the version of cgminer i'm using. forum looks great and everything seems to be coming along nicely.

Hey shibe,

The work restarts occur because we changed the algorithm to do something after a block was found over the weekend.

Previously, when a block was found, we waited for the network to reply with whether it was accepted. That took up to 250ms. Any blocks found during that time would be "Lost" if our first block was accepted, because we would be finding two blocks at the same height. I think that most pools just accept these blocks as the pool orphaning its own blocks.

The new algorithm is that, as soon as a block is found, we immediately switch to the second most profitable coin for those 250ms, and then switch back. That way, there is no wasted work. But to the miner, it appears as if there are many work restarts. The work restarts do cost time, but even if it takes 100ms to execute a work restart, then miners are saving electricity during those 100ms and are doing useful work during the other 150ms that would have been wasted anyway.

By our calculations, this algorithm increased profitability significantly, so that we are making about 0.001/day. You should be able to ignore those messages, as the math shows that this is optimal despite what cgminer says. Perhaps you could monitor your actual earnings and let us know if they are lower than expected. If it turns out that there is a flaw in our reasoning, then we can revert this particular change.

-Steve