System restart today, February 17

We've finally been able to complete the performance improvements that we've been working on for the past few weeks, and Chris certified them for release last night.

These improvements reduce the number of database queries to register 1000 shares from about 20,000 to 10. The queries also produce many fewer dead rows in the database, so VACUUM operations don't require long cleanups the next weekend.

At the same time, we've also implemented code to put these database operations on a separate core, and also to put daemon operations on a separate core as well. By placing these operations on a separate core, we were able to increase the number of miners who could run simultaneously after initial startup from about 250 to about 500. We haven't yet worked significantly on improving that number but plan to investigate that this weekend.

After the release, we expect that the database performance limitations will be eliminated, and the database will rarely, if ever, get behind again. The mining server is still CPU-limited, but that limit has not yet been reached.

The system will be offline for 5-10 minutes while Chris implements the changes.

Not sure if the updates are all completed or what not. But as of a few hours ago my miners in 2 diff locations have very crappy connection w/ high stales to the pool, there have been several failovers to my backup pool as well.

Nevermind, seems normal now ... maybe its just that coin or something... dont know. It was an extremely fast block coin.

Sorry about that.

Yesterday's release failed and we reverted. There were five problems that we did not encounter in the development environment. We were able to fix four of the issues, which is why we kept bringing the server online and back off again. The fifth was too difficult to resolve during the middle of the week and we will have to again delay until the weekend.

We will keep trying to get this release out, as it is by far the most important step forward for the pool at the current time.

Ah, very cool! =)