Status as of Sunday, October 19

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! There's lots to talk about today, so I'll only mention the relevant points.

• Thanks for putting up with us yesterday. I don't anticipate us needing to do maintenance like that for at least the end of the year. There are at least 50 changes in this release, but most of the things that we did were designed to future-proof the system architecture for upcoming features. We can now implement merge mining with a 2-minute restart, multiple exchanges with no effect to miners at all, and better mining of multiple coins, again with just a 2-minute restart.
• The reason it took so long to execute the release is because we needed to upgrade from Postgres 9.1 to 9.3, which involved creating an entire new virtual machine. Postgres 9.3 provides extremely improved performance in a number of areas, most notably in that it can count rows in a table far more efficiently than 9.1 could. After upgrading, we then had to modify the table schema to support merge mining, and each of the five queries lasted up to one hour, since the tables containing shares had 26m rows. We will likely look at reducing the size of those tables in an upcoming release, probably by archiving old shares offline for tax purposes, since few people will care about shares from years ago.
• Most payouts executed successfully this morning, but there are a few coins where the total to be paid out (like blackcoins) is so low that Cryptsy won't allow us to withdrawal our balances when users have "ignore payout threshold" checked. Their withdrawal limits are pretty high, and we hadn't anticipated the issue. This afternoon, we'll buy more coins in those currencies and manually execute the payouts, and then come up with a longer-term solution to the issue. A similar issue seems to affect Coinbase payouts.
• Poolpicker is back again with its bugs. Last time, they told us that their system was looking at profits one day delayed, so I changed the data we were providing them by one day. Now, they are posting profitability from the future. I'm going to ask Chris to figure it out with the owners of poolpicker so that they can fix the issues in their system.
• Elacoins returned for another run yesterday, and we were able to extract another 0.39 of value from the market when someone put up a buy order at 4701.
• If you have any questions or suggestions about the new features, feel free to comment below. The documentation has been extensively rewritten with new explanations and formulas to reflect the upgraded system. In particular, if you notice any regressions, please point them out to us, as it's possible that our testing could have missed some things.
• Today, I will be working to fix the few issues with payouts, trying a few things with merge mining again, and working on a way to archive old shares to prevent performance degradation in the future.

[Steve Sokolowski]

There was a problem with some miners being assigned negative difficulties as a result of the upgrade, which required a server restart around 7pm. That issue should now be resolved.

[cryptorific]

You should checkout the mature and full balance columns, they seem to be identical without the normal 24 hr delay.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I investigated the issue and this seems to be a display error; the payouts are still calculating as expected in the database. I will look in to fixing how the website reports mature balances tomorrow.