Status as of Saturday, April 30

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Sat Apr 30, 2016 8:35 am

Good morning! Here's today's status:

A new mining server will go out tonight. Most of the major changes involve performance improvements - we think we were able to reduce CPU usage by 15% in this update. However, because performance enhancements usually involve writing more complicated code, there may be an issue or two.
Also in this release will be the return of "static work restart intervals." We had thought that these wouldn't be necessary now that work restart testing isn't needed, but it turns out that Nicehash is over-penalizing miners for using the pool with default settings. The new static work restart interval allows miners to be penalized less at Prohashing than Nicehash would penalize them. Details on how to adjust these settings will be included in the documentation in the concurrent website release.
This release will include some code that better handles improved orphan rates in coins that have a lot of reserved blocks. Previously, the extra profit would be credited to miners, but the reversals would not influence whether that coin was selected. Now, coins that have many reversals will see those reversals reflected in their orphan rates. As a result, profits will rise because those coins will be selected more frequently than they would have been before.
By tonight, Chris will have completed re-compilation of all 160 mining daemons, so all coins are now operating on the orphan bonus code.
After we have verified that the performance improvements are adequate, I'll be working on live website updates for found blocks, so that miners will be able to leave the browser window open and watch the blocks roll in. I'll also be working on a way to donate dust to the pool's profits, because a longstanding request from customers has been to be able to get rid of balances they no longer want.