Release tonight

[Steve Sokolowski]

There will be a major release of the mining server tonight to eliminate work restart testing and replace it with an even better algorithm. The website will be down at the same time to update it with the documentation for this change. The changes will improve profitability and connectivity, and simplify mining.

Expect a few issues that always come up after a major release. We plan to execute around midnight Eastern. After everything with the main site is back online, these forums will be taken offline for an hour for a complete server backup.

[Chris Sokolowski]

The update has been successfully released. There were two major changes in this update:

[*]Work restart testing has been eliminated. The server no longer calculates work restart times by issuing difficulty 16 shares. Instead, we now use the shortest delay between a work restart and the first share submitted, within the last two hours, at whatever difficulty the miner uses. Work restart times are always computed automatically, and the "r=" password argument has been eliminated. All "r=" password arguments are now ignored; if you are using "r=" in your password, you can safely eliminate it. This change provides more accurate work restart times, avoids wasted mining time, and allows Nicehash users to connect without any special configuration.

[*]Varying coin precision has been added. Previously, the server assumed that all coins were divisible into 8 decimal places. However, we discovered that Novacoin and its forks only support 6 decimals of precision. When we query coin daemons for block reward, they return integers without decimal places, so we had divided all the reported rewards by 10^8 to get the actual reward. Since Novacoin and its forks have a precision of 6, that means the we were reporting block rewards 100x lower than reality, and these coins were therefore never mined due to low profitability. With this correction, the pool is now mining many more proof-of-stake coins and profitability should increase.

The help files have also been updated and clarified, so if you are wondering how work restarts work and why they are important, check out the help files.

[Chris Sokolowski]

The forum server backup has been completed.

There will be some delayed shares as we vacuum tables on the main server.

[kires]

Thanks a lot. The work restart testing is a big deal for me, and I'm guessing for many other users as well. Awesome!

[Hashing Tortoise]

Don't understand what you did, but my stuff seems to be working a bit better.