Status as of Monday, July 13

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 9:20 am

Here's today's status:

I added a feature to the mining server that can now deal with the case where a miner freezes on work restart testing, but would otherwise mine properly. Now, after 15 seconds of no response, the testing is stopped and an error is posted on the user's page about that miner failing restart testing and asking the user to use the r= password argument. Then, mining is temporarily resumed with a very conservative setting for r. This fix is not yet deployed.
The block explorer is almost fully indexed. However, wallets have incorrect balances in most coins because we discovered that forks occur often. The first attempt at a cleanup script failed and left the wallet balances incorrect. We have a query to fix that, but it is unclear whether the system's hard drives could handle the query and still insert shares at the same time, so we may never be able to correct this problem. Fortunately, only 0.1% or so of wallets are affected.
I spent 12 hours trying to get proof-of-stake coin mining working again. Something with merge mining had caused them to lose blocks, and fixing this issue would increase profitability. Unfortunately, I was unable to make any progress on the issue. Since merge mining took 1.5 months to get working, it should be expected that 100% of my time will be devoted to resolving this issue for a long time, possibly for the rest of July. But when it is fixed, we'll be able to add a lot of coins to the system.
We reviewed options with solid state disks and determined that disk performance can be improved by a factor of 10x over what it is now, at a minimum, possibly 20x. But the cost of that is $1500. Since the block explorer is the main part of the system causing the increased load that requires the solid state disks, and the block explorer doesn't directly earn profits, it's difficult to justify the cost of these disks. We'll keep monitoring Google Analytics to see if the block explorer starts bringing in more referrals, and if the explorer sees usage, we'll reevaluate this decision. In the meantime, we are currently disabling block exploring of coins as soon as they hit their first orphaned block or fork, since we don't have the disk performance to recover from that.