vardiff

I was wondering if there is a way to set vardiff for the pool, my friend signed up and is only getting 22mhs with his 27 mhs asic with the current settings.

Vardiff is enabled automatically. You'll see that the difficulty can go up to as high as 16384. That should be high enough to reduce any losses caused by too much bandwidth usage.

Kristof noticed this issue a while ago, and this is currently the only issue that's holding us back from scaling up. We still can't get our hands on any scrypt ASICs, and until we do we won't be able to troubleshoot exactly what is causing the decline. We're hoping that we might get some by Tuesday.

One of the theories is that certain models of ASICs are made to mine very difficult coins when blocks are rarely found, like litecoins, and providing them with new work reduces their efficiency. The ASIC manufacturers advertise their mining rate in these perfect conditions, which never actually happens in the real world. Even if you could get that 27 Mh mining litecoins, it would still make more sense to use a switching pool.

One of the experiments I'm going to have Chris test is to put our ASICs, whenever they finally arrive, on other pools for an hour at a time and to record their hashrates. If it turns out that the other pools have higher hashrates, then there must be a bug. Unfortunately, however, I think that the ASIC manufacturers are just advertising their products to people who think the ASICs will earn more than they can actually earn. We'll know more in a few days about whether this is true.

Which asic is he using? I'm fairly sure this has to do with the way that the asic's actually get work and then distribute it among the cores in the asic unit. My A2 unit gets its advertised speed on prohashing and a typical litecoin pool, however my zeusminer slows down a bit on prohashing versus a litecoin pool. As best as I can tell the zeusminer has fairly low bandwidth between the controller and actual mining chips. Since prohashing is sending out new work at a higher rate than a litecoin pool would the time it takes for the controller to refresh the work on the actual mining cores is causing the miner to waste time restarting on new work. This makes sense if you look at the hardware the zeusminer is using. They use a cp210x uart-usb chip, uart is rather slow way of communication, 1mbp or so is the max bandwidth which would be fine if you weren't constantly restarting work and compound that with any other internal bottlenecks and you'll experience what is happening.

I am only running @ 66% efficiency and have to think it's the 2048 diff being applied. Im running a 13mh/s black widow and have always had the best luck @ 1024.
On this pool s there a way through worker password to force a diff? For instance d=1024 that works on other pools?

thanks,
john

Right now we do have the option to manually set difficulty. It is definitely on our list of features to add in the future.

Chris Sokolowski wrote:Right now we do have the option to manually set difficulty. It is definitely on our list of features to add in the future.

Hey Chris thanks for reply.

So you are saying you can adjust diff from your end? Is this on an individual basis? If so, please adjust my acct to 1024. That diff works great for the current rig plus others currently being rented @ MRR that I can point to prohashing when they're not renting.

Thanks,
john (cryptoloot)

The current code does does not allow us to change difficulty for individual users, only the entire pool. Since it is working right now (automatic with a maximum of 2048) we don't want to change it and risk the potential of breaking many other users' miners. Allowing users to set their own difficulties is definitely a feature we want to add in the future.

Chris Sokolowski wrote:The current code does does not allow us to change difficulty for individual users, only the entire pool. Since it is working right now (automatic with a maximum of 2048) we don't want to change it and risk the potential of breaking many other users' miners. Allowing users to set their own difficulties is definitely a feature we want to add in the future.

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation.