Status as of Sunday, July 26

[Steve Sokolowski]

Now that there is finally time to breathe again, I'll provide a status update.

• For the past few days, there were some periods where the server continued to accept shares, but did not correctly record them, causing lost money. As written earlier, Chris compensated miners by increasing earnings 10% across the board earlier in the week. The issue is now resolved, all compensation has already been provided, and the 10% bonus is over.
• We resolved this issue in a number of ways. First, we modified the way the mining server handles a busy database server. Instead of creating many insert threads, there is now one thread that queues shares in order. This new design leads to less memory usage and appears to be able to handle any number of shares. Second, we added a warning message to the site, that appears when the database is under heavy load, to notify users that statistics are not completely up to date. Third, the solid state disks have improved performance sufficiently that even long-running queries return eventually.
• Today, we will be performing massive queries on the server all day to clean up old shares (and accompanying information), and to rebuild the block explorer wallets after a previous bug caused the balances to become off.
• There was an issue with one customer yesterday caused by Chris's entering the wrong coin for a market, which caused him to earn a large amount of money over the past few days. All in all, he profited 0.08 bitcoins above market value due to the mistake, which we paid. We then disabled the Peercoin market. In the future, we will be posting a message on the website recommending not to use rented hashrate on this pool because markets may go into an error state at any time.
• We plan to release some fixes to the mining server this morning to further improve stability. One user is accidentally trying to mine a coin of "bitcoin," which is causing minor errors, there are cases where users are receiving slightly less money than they should because the average work restart penalty is being computed incorrectly for them, and disabling markets previously could cause a crash. The restart will fix these issues.
• Some miners pointed out coins that got stuck with payouts. The cause was that Cryptsy disabled some markets. Those coins should now be fixed and paid out, or (in the case that Cryptsy refuses to unlock the wallet), the money is lost until they do.
• Thanks for your understanding of these problems over the past few days. Chris is always available to help if the need arises.

[skyecraft]

very nice work