[1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool - page 433.

kano

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Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 08:49:22 PM

It's possible the pool hash rate was moving around a lot that day though. The share difficulty needs to adjust quickly as the network hash rate changes.
...

Actually, no it doesn't need to adjust quickly.
That simply means it will have the erratic adjustments it is having ... and since the source information itself is erratic - (badly) estimated pool hash rate - it will be even more so ...

roy7

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It's possible the pool hash rate was moving around a lot that day though. The share difficulty needs to adjust quickly as the network hash rate changes. Since starting my graph 3 hours ago, the non-stale hash rate has been reported from 89T-139T.

I wonder how much of that is actual changes in the makeup of the pool, and how much is variation in the reporting even with no real change in who is mining.

kano

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When I fired up p2pool less than a week ago it was showing diff as high as 870k and as low as 650k in the same day ... the few times I clicked on the page ...
Your graph is showing over 10% in a 2 hour range ...

Anyway, it doesn't matter if the code has a limit of 1% per share ... there's ~120 shares per hour Tongue

There's the variance of a high network diff vs a small pool (current diff=15,100TH/s p2pool currently says 134TH i.e. less than 1%)
There's the variance due to a high share diff
There's the variance of the share diff itself (it's very erratic over a short time)

The 3rd one is unnecessary ... and needs to be fixed.

heh I just clicked on my p2pool page again a few minutes later and it says 170TH/s ...

roy7

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Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 03:42:57 PM

The issue there is the reason why the difficulty jumps so violently all over the place.

Since I can't find what I was looking for... I made it myself!

http://vtc-us-east.royalminingco.com/p2pool_share_history/diff_history.png

That image will be updated automatically once per minute, plotting share difficulty vs pool non-stale hash rate. Looking over the share chain by hand I couldn't see the difficulty jumping around all that much, so this will at least give us a clear 24 hour picture once it has been running for a full day.

I assume you aren't confusing the share difficulty to find valid shares with the vardiff difficulty sent to your miner on what work to report back for stat purposes.

Edit: Of course, the target difficulty does increase above the share difficulty for miners who are large enough to be generating over 1.67% of the whole share chain (or if people elect to). But as a smaller miner, that doesn't apply in your case. You just need to find the normal minimum difficulty to get a share into the chain.

smooth

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Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 03:42:57 PM

Quote

I'm not disagreeing with you. But one thing to remember is the PPLNS window in p2pool is currently 3 days since the move to a 30 second retarget time. So the daily variance in your # of shares is softened, since your payments are tied to the variance in your total # of shares over 3 days instead.

Yeah except that since my 150GH/s is small for p2pool the variance is easily pushing results out the window Sad

No its not.

Quote

28th 3 shares
29th 3 shares
30th 3 shares
31st 3 shares
1st 9 shares

Let's look at your three day averages:

30th: 3
31st: 3
1st: 5

That is not exactly massive variance.

If you come up with a longer sequence of days where there are zero-share days the same thing will happen. There will be some small jumps and dips but nothing crazy. You won't have a week of no shares for example.

If you have 150 GH and that averages 6 shares/day then your three day average will not really move around very much.

smoothrunnings

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Quote from: freebit13 on February 01, 2014, 04:49:58 PM

Quote from: oldbushie on January 31, 2014, 10:40:53 PM

I'm losing hope here... we lost 100 users which certainly isn't helping variance.

Perhaps it's the patronizing "tone" some of the users here feel the need to use when others ask questions. Some even call themselves "old timers" with 8 months experience. I know it's made me look elsewhere...

The lack of finding work, aka blocks, isn't related to just pool but everyone feels it. Before building and using my own P2Pool server I was using Bitminter who was going through weeks of not finding any work and their overall pool numbers started to dwindle. Now they are back to almost 380TH/s, what we are seeing will pass and another pool will be affected then everyone on that pool or almost everyone will jump ship.

freebit13

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I got Satoshi's avatar!

Quote from: oldbushie on January 31, 2014, 10:40:53 PM

I'm losing hope here... we lost 100 users which certainly isn't helping variance.

Perhaps it's the patronizing "tone" some of the users here feel the need to use when others ask questions. Some even call themselves "old timers" with 8 months experience. I know it's made me look elsewhere...

roy7

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Is there a site someplace with a historical graph of the p2pool share chain difficulty? Google has failed me on this one. I'm curious how much the difficulty on the share chain actually moves around.

(A number of alt coins seem to have having success with the Kimoto Gravity Well difficulty algorithm. I don't know the specifics myself, but it changes difficulty each block like XPM/PPC do.)

Edit: Manually clicking through the share chain I see the minimum difficulty changes each share already. I'm curious what the graph looks like though, since kano mentioned it various highly. So far, the biggest single share difficulty adjustment I can find is about 1% of the prior value.

smoothrunnings

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Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 03:42:57 PM

Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 09:13:42 AM

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

Some days I get as low as 0 or 1 share, other days (today) I've got 9 shares so far with 6 hours to go ...
Expected is 6 shares a day.

I'm not disagreeing with you. But one thing to remember is the PPLNS window in p2pool is currently 3 days since the move to a 30 second retarget time. So the daily variance in your # of shares is softened, since your payments are tied to the variance in your total # of shares over 3 days instead.

Yeah except that since my 150GH/s is small for p2pool the variance is easily pushing results out the window Sad

28th 3 shares
29th 3 shares
30th 3 shares
31st 3 shares
1st 9 shares

(Edit: yes the 0/1 shares was the 50GH/s for a couple of days)

Rejects 2 shares ... yes better than average

Look here if you are interested.
http://198.245.60.111/Pix/20140102-p2poo.png

Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 09:13:42 AM

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

Yes that's variance, yes that's expected, and yes the way the pool handles difficulty is screwed (as I've explained before Tongue

)

When I read the last 5 months of posts the other day I saw some discussions you had on the difficulty and large miners having increased difficulty to reduce the total # of shares they have in the sharechain. Edit: Was back around December. I thought there were 2-3 excellent replies that clarified it all for you, but I guess you didn't accept their explanations?

The issue there is the reason why the difficulty jumps so violently all over the place.
The method used isn't valid.
It uses the bitcoind method of estimating difficulty - which with bitcoind is applied to a set of fixed difficulty data and thus produces the expected result.
With p2pool it's a random set of difficulty data (that changes each share) and thus produces the exceptionally high varying difficulty ... as can be clearly seen.

Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 09:13:42 AM

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

IMO p2pool has massive variance for small miners and I'd call my 150GH/s here a small miners (which it is)

Yes, if p2pool is dropping 150GH miners like flies that's a serious problem. A single GPU miner somewhere can just not be worried about. When I hear "small miner" I think someone who has an expected share rate below 1 a day, so at times they will not even be in the share chain and receive no payments. I wouldn't think, myself, that a miner with an average 18 shares on the chain is 'small'.

My share chain shares have been 3, 6, 9, 9, 15 Tongue

(though it's lower since 2 shares where rejected and I'd have to work out which 2 they were)
I've not reached 18 in 3 days yet ...

(... yes I've not commented about the low block finding ... i.e. low payout ... I've not looked at it closely)

Edit: just got 2 shares in 3 minutes ... 1 rejected Sad

The real issue here is that now that bitcoin network equals to more than the top 500 super computers in the world times 256, that we have reached a level were we are mining faster than there are blocks! So we have run out of bitcoins and will have to wait until the other 20 million become available! LOL Wink

kano

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Linux since 1997 RedHat 4

Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 09:13:42 AM

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

Some days I get as low as 0 or 1 share, other days (today) I've got 9 shares so far with 6 hours to go ...
Expected is 6 shares a day.

I'm not disagreeing with you. But one thing to remember is the PPLNS window in p2pool is currently 3 days since the move to a 30 second retarget time. So the daily variance in your # of shares is softened, since your payments are tied to the variance in your total # of shares over 3 days instead.

Yeah except that since my 150GH/s is small for p2pool the variance is easily pushing results out the window Sad

28th 3 shares
29th 3 shares
30th 3 shares
31st 3 shares
1st 9 shares

(Edit: yes the 0/1 shares was the 50GH/s for a couple of days)

Rejects 2 shares ... yes better than average

Look here if you are interested.
http://198.245.60.111/Pix/20140102-p2poo.png

Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 09:13:42 AM

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

Yes that's variance, yes that's expected, and yes the way the pool handles difficulty is screwed (as I've explained before Tongue

)

When I read the last 5 months of posts the other day I saw some discussions you had on the difficulty and large miners having increased difficulty to reduce the total # of shares they have in the sharechain. Edit: Was back around December. I thought there were 2-3 excellent replies that clarified it all for you, but I guess you didn't accept their explanations?

The issue there is the reason why the difficulty jumps so violently all over the place.
The method used isn't valid.
It uses the bitcoind method of estimating difficulty - which with bitcoind is applied to a set of fixed difficulty data and thus produces the expected result.
With p2pool it's a random set of difficulty data (that changes each share) and thus produces the exceptionally high varying difficulty ... as can be clearly seen.

Quote from: roy7 on February 01, 2014, 09:13:42 AM

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

IMO p2pool has massive variance for small miners and I'd call my 150GH/s here a small miners (which it is)

Yes, if p2pool is dropping 150GH miners like flies that's a serious problem. A single GPU miner somewhere can just not be worried about. When I hear "small miner" I think someone who has an expected share rate below 1 a day, so at times they will not even be in the share chain and receive no payments. I wouldn't think, myself, that a miner with an average 18 shares on the chain is 'small'.

My share chain shares have been 3, 6, 9, 9, 15 Tongue

(though it's lower since 2 shares where rejected and I'd have to work out which 2 they were)
I've not reached 18 in 3 days yet ...

(... yes I've not commented about the low block finding ... i.e. low payout ... I've not looked at it closely)

Edit: just got 2 shares in 3 minutes ... 1 rejected Sad

Krak

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Quote from: smoothrunnings on February 01, 2014, 01:34:06 PM

Is anyone having a hard time finding bitcoin blocks?

Apparently the whole pool is.

smoothrunnings

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Is anyone having a hard time finding bitcoin blocks?

oldbushie

member

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I wonder if the anomaly from Jan 19 is what partially caused the mass exodus, considering that's when users started dropping off considerably.

roy7

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Activity: 434

Merit: 250

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

Some days I get as low as 0 or 1 share, other days (today) I've got 9 shares so far with 6 hours to go ...
Expected is 6 shares a day.

I'm not disagreeing with you. But one thing to remember is the PPLNS window in p2pool is currently 3 days since the move to a 30 second retarget time. So the daily variance in your # of shares is softened, since your payments are tied to the variance in your total # of shares over 3 days instead.

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

Yes that's variance, yes that's expected, and yes the way the pool handles difficulty is screwed (as I've explained before Tongue

)

When I read the last 5 months of posts the other day I saw some discussions you had on the difficulty and large miners having increased difficulty to reduce the total # of shares they have in the sharechain. Edit: Was back around December. I thought there were 2-3 excellent replies that clarified it all for you, but I guess you didn't accept their explanations?

Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

IMO p2pool has massive variance for small miners and I'd call my 150GH/s here a small miners (which it is)

Yes, if p2pool is dropping 150GH miners like flies that's a serious problem. A single GPU miner somewhere can just not be worried about. When I hear "small miner" I think someone who has an expected share rate below 1 a day, so at times they will not even be in the share chain and receive no payments. I wouldn't think, myself, that a miner with an average 18 shares on the chain is 'small'.

tvb

newbie

Activity: 38

Merit: 0

Is there a forum post or website where all the altcoin networks.py settings are being shared? I can see the P2pool forks on Github where people commit their own networks.py settings back to their own repository but none are being merged back into the original forrestv/p2pool repository. For now, I am specifically searching for the Digibyte altcoin but would like to add the other altcoins later on as well.

I am talking about this part:

Code:

litecoin=math.Object(
    PARENT=networks.nets['litecoin'],
    SHARE_PERIOD=15, # seconds
    CHAIN_LENGTH=24*60*60//10, # shares
    REAL_CHAIN_LENGTH=24*60*60//10, # shares
    TARGET_LOOKBEHIND=200, # shares
    SPREAD=3, # blocks
    IDENTIFIER='e037d5b8c6923410'.decode('hex'),
    PREFIX='7208c1a53ef629b0'.decode('hex'),
    P2P_PORT=9 338,
    MIN_TARGET=0,
    MAX_TARGET=2**256//2**20 - 1,
    PERSIST=True,
    WORKER_PORT=9327,
    BOOTSTRAP_ADDRS='...'.split(' '),
    ANNOUNCE_CHANNEL='#p2pool-ltc',
    VERSION_CHECK=lambda v: True,
    VERSION_WARNING=lambda v: 'Upgrade Litecoin to >=0.8.5.1!' if v < 80501 else None,
),

And if none are being shared publicly, how do I correctly edit the settings myself for the different altcoins?

smoothrunnings

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Is anyone using this?

https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool.info2

smooth

legendary

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Quote from: kano on February 01, 2014, 01:54:46 AM

For the sake of having another pool to balance against (yes I do this on occasion) a % (due to balance) of my hash rate is pointing at p2pool.
As normal the variance is astounding.
150GH/s pointed at p2pool is also too small to expect any better variance when the difficulty is in the high 100,000's
Some days I get as low as 0 or 1 share, other days (today) I've got 9 shares so far with 6 hours to go ...
Expected is 6 shares a day.
Yes that's variance, yes that's expected, and yes the way the pool handles difficulty is screwed (as I've explained before Tongue

)
IMO p2pool has massive variance for small miners and I'd call my 150GH/s here a small miners (which it is)

Don't forget the shares are active for a while (more than a day I think) so even if you get no shares or fewer shares you may still have old shares that pay out.

Your point is valid though.

smoothrunnings

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Activity: 630

Merit: 501

Quote from: roy7 on January 31, 2014, 06:13:46 PM

Quote from: smoothrunnings on January 31, 2014, 05:45:28 PM

Is there any other front ends other than the extended front end for P2Pool?

I've seen a few. None that are like official public "download here" interfaces that I know of. For example here are a couple variations:

http://p2pool.etyd.org:9171/static/
http://q30.qhor.net:9171/static/

Edit: Found another one, with source.

https://github.com/johndoe75/p2pool-node-status

as used on:

http://bitcoin.p2pool.fr:9332/static/

I really like the p2pool-node-status page more so than the extended front end one. Thanks!

Let me know if you see any others.

kano

legendary

Activity: 4634

Merit: 1851

Linux since 1997 RedHat 4

For the sake of having another pool to balance against (yes I do this on occasion) a % (due to balance) of my hash rate is pointing at p2pool.
As normal the variance is astounding.
150GH/s pointed at p2pool is also too small to expect any better variance when the difficulty is in the high 100,000's
Some days I get as low as 0 or 1 share, other days (today) I've got 9 shares so far with 6 hours to go ...
Expected is 6 shares a day.
Yes that's variance, yes that's expected, and yes the way the pool handles difficulty is screwed (as I've explained before Tongue

)
IMO p2pool has massive variance for small miners and I'd call my 150GH/s here a small miners (which it is)

smooth

legendary

Activity: 2968

Merit: 1198

It does stand to reason that smaller miners with a few GH or even less -- say USB miners of various types -- of which there are probably a large number, may be dropping off as the difficulty rises. I've argued in the past they really shouldn't worry about it and should just accept a few dollars per day in variance, but that doesn't mean they will actually do what I say. Many have probably switched over to PPS or other pools.

I don't really know what can or should be done about that. The current design of p2pool doesn't really lend itself to supporting arbitrarily small miners in the way people seem to want (or even at all if one considers the cost of running a full bitcoin node).

Topic: [1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool - page 433. (Read 2591964 times)