Status as of Monday, August 1

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good evening! Here's a few words on our current goings on:

• I spent the weekend researching different types of performance improvements for the coin assignment algorithm. This is a task that I've spent at least 100 hours on during the past few months. When we can finally crack this issue, we will not only be able to support insane amounts of hashrate, but we will also be able to handle additional mining algorithms. For now, we can handle at least 100 GH/s of scrypt miners without issues, but we want to be able to do more than that in the future.
• Unfortunately, I failed after three days of work and reverted the changes. The limitation of our system is mining server CPU usage, and the changes actually increased CPU usage in the average case. Later this week, I'm going to work on some more moderate adjustments. It should be easy to mathematically prove that they result in the same coin assignments as the old algorithm, and easy to test performance, so hopefully we'll be able to make some progress on this issue.
• Chris is going on vacation this week. He'll return on August 11. In the meantime, expect delayed responses to customer service requests for a few days, but he will still strive to get back to customers within two days.
• Chris enabled eight coins from Novaexchange today, and there are 300 new markets. The new markets will increase profits from existing coins. One new coin, PapaFransescocoin, saw miners earning 20 cents for hours this morning. While I can't say so for sure yet, today could be a banner day, at least in comparison to the going profitability. Such is the way scrypt mining works - most of the time, it's just average or poor profits, but there are occasionally periods where profitability becomes ridiculous. Being a profitable miner often depends on simply having your machines on during these unpredictable periods.

In conclusion, don't expect any new features for two weeks, but there may be a restart here or there because I can't profile these changes in development. Chris will be on vacation, and I will be spending 100% of my time on these performance features. As always feel free to comment.

[CritterDog]

Thanks for the update Steve! I really appreciate the work you and Chris do on this pool and the interaction is great! You guys rock!