I'm about to install the bitcoin-qt client on the computer i'm running my miner through, I guess it takes a few days now... will it impair the efficiency of my asic machine?
I want to join p2pool but I have one computer I work on, and one that does the mining (which I had to replace recently - thus - no client
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If your machine is reasonably fast, it can run P2Pool, your miners, the lot. Anything with an i3 or better is fine.
The main restriction with running your own node is bandwidth. The average DSL connection can't provide what p2pool and bitcoin need to keep your stale rate low.
M
No, it isn't. p2pool only needs a few tens of kilobytes per second. You could do that on 512k DSL no problems. It's getblocktemplate latency that's the issue, which is purely bitcoind hogging CPU.
But, hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good argument.
The situation is usually more complicated (which is why people often don't agree here on what is enough/good for p2pool: they have widely different situations to compare).
getblocktemplate latency isn't much of an issue if you have a multi-core CPU and your system workload leaves at least one core free for p2pool even when bitcoind is hogging one core.
It's clearly a problem when you don't have this free core (p2pool slows down and your efficiency dives).
A 512k DSL is clearly enough,
but this assumes you don't use it for anything else that makes your link latency rise.
If you can setup QoS on your DSL and eliminate the influence of other traffic then clearly you can use p2pool on a DSL link. Unfortunately it's often not simple to do: some routers actively shape the traffic the way they want without letting users have much to tune or making the rest of the traffic too unreliable.
Even with a decent knowledge and control of the QoS settings you can have problems. For example I shot myself in the foot once, my QoS settings were perfect for bitcoind and p2pool but they caused timeouts repeatedly in my irc client.
