Status as of Sunday, June 25, 2017
Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2017 9:11 am
Here's today's few points:
- Yesterday, I made a breakthrough and successfully managed to get the mining server working with pypy, a Python implementation that compiles frequently-run code to machine language. This was the logical next step because the majority of CPU time was now spent in Python functions that assign miners to coins. The improvement was vast enough that I was for the first time able to get the 5000 worker script to run, whereas with CPython it would stutter and crash. I think that CPU usage will be reduced enough that we can have 1.4TH/s of capacity and 6000 workers before the next optimization needs to be made somewhere else.
- However, the process to release these changes will require about 20 steps to install many dependencies. I can test everything in development, but with so many dependencies, something is bound to go wrong at first in production. Since the system is not at capacity right now and the other bugfixes are minor, we decided to wait until July 2, or when the system hits 900 GH/s scrypt + x11, whichever occurs first.
- Chris tried to spend $1200 on purse.io to order the solid state disks for July 6 installation, but he found that the cost of transaction fees to send the bitcoins outweighed the discounts he could receive by saving those fees, so he used a credit card. This should be a lesson to merchants - if you want customers to purchase your products, accept litecoins/ETH or the price with fees is too high.
- Chris spent the day adding 30 new coins and discontinuing old coins, which should have improved profitability. He also investigated why some coins go into error for brief periods of time and tweaked configuration to try to solve that problem. He did not get to the ticketing system yet and will do that soon. At this point, Chris has now resolved all the issues backlogged by the attacks.
- I successfully completed the transition of the default payout coin to litecoins. Now, litecoins will be earned instead of bitcoins when customers' preferred payout coins are in error. This way, there won't be useless bitcoins sitting in accounts anymore.