CritterDog wrote:Steve Sokolowski wrote:CritterDog wrote:I noticed yesterday I did a short test just checking the re-start time which I was not even going to mention because it was only about a 30 min test. But on my A2 screen it showed that I had found 7 blocks but on the Prohash pool it only showed I had found 2 blocks.
This is interesting. Which coin were you mining that it failed to show blocks for? Or, if you don't know that, which coin did you find the two blocks for?
If this is an easy coin, it is possible that your miner found blocks after someone from the pool had already found that block, due to network latency, and therefore your block was discarded. But I would need to know the coin to look into that.
I don't remember witch coin it was that it showed I had found the 2 blocks. I do remember the 2 were both on the same coin and I think it started with a E like maybe extream coin or maybe exitcoin but to be honest I really do not remember but it was a pretty good payout coin and pretty sure it started with E if that helps.. On the ones I did not get my miner software does not say what the name is.. It only keeps track of the total blocks found. And I notice my A2 will not find many blocks unless I set the difficulty very low like d=512.. I noticed my smaller gblade miners 4 of them seem to find more blocks then the A2 does. But if I lower the difficulty of the A2 then it starts finding blocks.. If I leave it set on d=4096 it never seems to get any blocks.. But I never really tested this.. In order to be sure I would have to run them seperate times and count blocks with the smaller miners compared to the A2
The reason it finds so many blocks when the difficulty is low is because the pool will not reduce a miner's difficulty very low to mine easy coins. If your miner has a very high difficulty, then you will mine very difficult coins, resulting in few blocks being found.
I think the reason the blocks aren't being recorded is because other miners at our pool have found those blocks first. When that happens, we don't record them as orphans, because our own miners orphaned each other. In the future, it might be a good idea to record these so that users can see why that's going on.
Chris is going to look into work restart penalties tonight. We haven't been able to make sense of why profit is so high recently but some miners are complaining about low earnings. We think that the cause may be that some miners are getting a very high penalty, higher than what should be the case, and other miners have too low a penalty. Chris will investigate to see whether we should change the formula to better smooth out the curve.