Discovered bug with stale shares
Posted: Mon May 06, 2019 9:11 am
On Friday, we discovered a bug that causes a significant number of scrypt and SHA-256 miners to submit stale shares. For an unknown reason, these miners continue to mine from 3 to 27 blocks behind the current block, as if they are not receiving the latest work. X11 miners do not seem to be affected by the issue. Customer FATSURF reported this issue.
Yesterday, I discovered a secondary bug that was incorrectly crediting these miners money for submitting these stale shares. I fixed that bug and Chris restarted the mining servers to release the changes. However, that didn't resolve the core issue and we are continuing to investigate.
If this issue can be resolved, it's possible that scrypt profitability could increase by as much as 9.8%. However, after three days, I have not been able to determine why the mining server appears not to send new jobs to these miners. Hopefully, we'll be able to provide more information later this week if we are able to make progress.
Yesterday, I discovered a secondary bug that was incorrectly crediting these miners money for submitting these stale shares. I fixed that bug and Chris restarted the mining servers to release the changes. However, that didn't resolve the core issue and we are continuing to investigate.
If this issue can be resolved, it's possible that scrypt profitability could increase by as much as 9.8%. However, after three days, I have not been able to determine why the mining server appears not to send new jobs to these miners. Hopefully, we'll be able to provide more information later this week if we are able to make progress.