Status as of Sunday, December 6

Good morning! Here's a few brief notes:

• At the request of a customer, we added straight LTC mining to the charts page. There is now a second line that shows what could have been earned mining straight LTC compared to what the average person mined here. Since the red line is for the "average" miner, it's possible that with tuning you could earn more than that line. This feature will be finished tonight.
• After the successful upgrade to the database last week, we are working on mining server changes to take advantage of the increase in performance. I'm running tests today on the development servers to see what gains can be achieved.
• Orphan rates have been higher recently because there are more lost blocks than usual. Chris think the lost blocks are caused by CPU overload, so we modified the daemon management service to throttle CPU usage on daemons in addition to bandwidth when a block is found. Gregory Maxwell pointed out in a forum post that it's important to have CPU usage available to validate blocks when they are submitted to the network, so we hope that this change will reduce lost blocks and orphans. We'll see what effect this change has over the next few days.