Status as of Wednesday, September 19, 2018
Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2018 8:43 am
Good morning!
- As a result of last week's poll, our effort over the next few weeks continues to be focused on improving reliability. The monitoring system now checks 244 interfaces for issues and we have identified some services that seem to connect and disconnect at random times for unknown reasons. I'm now working on higher-level queries that understand more than just things like free disk space, to detect issues like failed payouts.
- Chris finally came up with a theory that a failing disk was the cause of the ETH synchronization issues. We discovered that Vertcoin and Feathercoin were also located on this disk, and those two coins were going into error frequently and disconnecting miners. Chris moved the data to a different disk and he is monitoring the system. Right now, there have been no further outages on that server in eight hours, and the system clock has remained synchronized during that time.
- Constance just released the ability to see actual and target payout proportions in the "live balances" boxes. The "target proportion" is what the miner requested to earn, and the "actual proportion" is what the miner actually is earning, given the status of coins that are in error. This new feature should help customers understand why certain coins are being earned. A new chart will follow soon, and this new chart will provide the user with a view of data that already exists comparing how much they earned in a coin for a given day compared to how much they intended to earn.
- We added support for several new Ethash coins that are highly profitable and restarted the mining server. However, those coins are not mineable because there is no exchange offering them that accepts US customers, given that HitBTC locked its wallet recently. The big exchange for these coins is Bitfinex. Once HitBTC unlockes its wallets, or if we are able to locate more exchanges that accept US customers, then we'll be able to significantly increase profitability on Ethash.
- The continuing loss of users despite scrypt profitability increasing, and the lack of growth in SHA-256 despite bitcoin difficulty increasing, is something that we want to better understand. This is confusing to me because I believe that the system is more stable and reliable than it has ever been, and yet there were more customers when we could barely keep up. If you decided to leave the pool recently, please reply or submit a support ticket explaining why so that we can get a better understanding of the issues that caused the decision.