Status as of Tuesday, December 18, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• For the first time, we do not anticipate the need to declare a "reduced support" period during the holiday week. During reduced support periods, we respond to urgent tickets, but other tickets can be delayed until the period has concluded. However, the number of tickets has declined significantly recently, thanks to some changes that Vance made to make payout failures less frequent. The lower number of tickets should be able to be resolved in the normal schedule.
• We spent time over the past four days investigating the cause of lost blocks for a number of coins. We successfully resolved the "x of y" Verge blocks with the same algorithm issue, and that should increase revenue by $1300 over 30 days. Chris discovered some ethash coins that were using outdated geth forks, and changed configuration parameters to reduce blocks for them. I also discovered that merge-mined blocks which were found by ASICBOOST miners were all lost, resulting in a 5.9% reduction in merge mining profits. That issue will be resolved in the next release, which will occur on Friday. Now that most major flaws have been addressed, our new release schedule will see mining server restarts only on Fridays, unless a critical issue surfaces before then. Eventually, we will reduce the frequency to monthly releases.
• The test grouping site was updated over the weekend. We found some additional bugs that only occur in circumstances that have not yet been present in production, and therefore will hold the final release until tomorrow. The goal is to identify any issues caused by the grouping release on Wednesday and Thursday, and make one more grouping website release before Constance leaves for the holidays on Friday.