Topic: [ANN] CoinLab Protected Pool - page 44. (Read 97805 times)

Sorry about the growing pains we've been having with our pool.  There are two sources for these communication failures.

1) We had capacity issues with our servers - causing them to slow down.
2) When we update our server software, we drop connections temporarily.

As we've gotten more demand for our pool, we've had to add additional front-end servers, and today we switched to high-cpu instances on Amazon.  We are trying to get ahead of the curve - as of today I think we've doubled our capacity, which should reduce latency and allow more miners to connect w/o overloading our servers again.

I want to assure you that even when we have intermittent communication failures, you should not be losing any shares.  We have a lenient 90-second share acceptance policy; so as long as your miner is able to re-establish a connection to our pool within 90 seconds from the time we gave you the work, you will still get credit for it (even if it is stale).

Thanks again for your feedback, patience and helping us improve our pool!

Mike Koss
CTO, CoinLab

I have had same experience with comm failures, pool not providing work fast enough, etc. What is the bottleneck for this, bandwidth? Server power on their side? I'm not that far geographically from them so that's not it. I also don't get these errors on other pools that are much farther away.

What he said. Or the bits of it I understood anyway. BTC Guild - rock solid. CoinLab - sputters like crazy.

Still having occasionally comunication failures and plenty of Pool not providing work fast enough. The very annoying thing is that is never bad enough for cgminer to consider the backup pool but bad enough for hashrate to drop (failover strategies).

Load balance strategy seems to always favour the backup pool even when CoinLab is doing OK, so no.
Balance strategy works, but with a hashrate often significantly reduced (70-50%), so no again.
The site is also sometimes unreachable.
NO, I do not have any net/software/hardware problems.

Any ETA on EU servers?

Much better!

I wouldn't mind a 60 min average or adjustable.

a good improvement on the Estimated hash rate based on 30 minute so i can view my actual hashrate !

keep up the good work !

Announcement:

The week of 9/9/12 has been paid out.

We have changed our week boundary from midday Monday PST to 12:00 AM Sunday UTC, so the statistics on the web interface will match payouts. 

As such, this week's payouts reflect about 5 days worth of mining, because the first couple days of this week were paid out last Monday.  Also, many of you have already earned coins this week, those will be paid next Monday.

Starting next week, we'll pay out the amount seen in the web interface for that week (or 2% more if you submitted more than 1.125M shares).  This should alleviate the confusion some of you having with why our payouts don't match the numbers in the web interface (it was because they were using different time periods).

If you have any questions, send them my way. 

Thanks,

Chris

PS:  I wasn't able to get through the Pool signup requests.  I didn't forget about you and I'll process you first thing tomorrow.

PSS: Our CTO is testing some improvements of our Hashrate Estimation in the web interface, and is now testing it on the live site.  So far the numbers look better (they weren't very accurate for large hashrates before), but you may see some weirdness tonight as we try different variations.  This estimate is completely separate from credit calculations, so seeing weird numbers doesn't put your mining earnings in jeopardy in any way.

In other news, we now have miner idle email notifications on the pool.

Here's how it works:
- Email/PM me to let me know you want idle notifications turned on
- Start/continue mining
- When we haven't seen you submit a share for 300 seconds (5 mins) we'll send you an email notification
- Once you've submitted another share, your active status will be reset, and the next time you don't submit a share for 5 mins, you'll be notified.


Email or PM me if you'd like email notifications enabled on your account. 

Payouts will be starting in ~30 mins.  Right now, we are pushing some new features to the admin pages that will streamline the payout process.

Actually Tuesday in some places, why do you ask ?

Is today Monday? 

When we implement our payout system, we'll use SSL (or TSL, I'll have to talk to the devs to learn the difference).

Right now, the only thing your password lets you do is:
- Earn Bitcoins by mining
- Check your mining stats

We're generating low-security random passwords for miners now, because we want you to realize that these passwords are NOT high security.   Until we automate the signup process, I have to enter each miner's password by hand, meaning I will see it, so users can't use high security passwords yet. Once our automated payment system is online, we'll require each miner to create a more secure password for their account. 

Thanks, I did miss them.

1) Your Loyalty Points are equivalent to the number of shares you have submitted, so you can see your total loyalty points in the "Total Shares" column of the web interface

2) No Loyalty Points have been redeemed yet, so the Total Shares column represents the total number of points you have

3,5) We don't have any indicators on the web interface when the price drops below $2.5/ghash/day but we'll post in this thread when it crosses the threshold if it happens before we get our automatic payment system online.  The automatic system will have an indicator. 

Currently, for us to cross the price floor threshold, BTCUSD price would have to drop to $6.7 or difficulty would have to increase by 175%.  The current 95% PPS rate is equivalent to $4.23/ghash/day.

4) $2.5/ghash/day is based on the MtGox 24hour average price.   If for any reason MtGox is no longer the most reliable source for pricing, we'll  discuss this change in this thread (but that seems unlikely in the near term).
4.1) No Loyalty Points have been redeemed yet, so the proportion for all users is 0.

Chris, any chance we can can get SSL, or preferably TSL connections to the website?  I know as it stands right now, there isn't anything to do but view the stats, but as things like miner settings, payouts, and others get added, encryption would make me feel a lot better.

Out of curiousity

Any idea what the total hashrate is for pool currently?

You may have missed these quesitons while you were sick. Just wondering if you could answer when you get a moment.

Thanks 

We use AWS for all of our servers right now, and they are all located in the US.

Glad to see you on your feet again and happy to hear that the pool is growing.
Are all the servers in the US?

Hello Miners,

Few announcements:

- Thanks to all of our miners for giving us a great stress test,  we found some inefficiencies in our code, and our pool keeps getting stronger

- We've put up a third server frontend and latency times are much lower.  If you switched to another pool until we fixed the lag, now is the time to give us another try   

- Pool join requests have all been processed.  If I missed yours, I'm sorry there were a ton, send me another PM.

- We made some small improvements to our hashrate estimate in the web interface, but it is still a work in progress.

- Thanks for the kind wishes, I'm feeling much better today 

Chris

You expect people to actually read something before they post?  Surely sir, you must be joking.