Is there no way to force the difficulty setting? I received an Alcheminer 256MH/s today, and it needs 50000+ diff to work properly. Setting d=50000 (or any difficulty on any rig, really) on nice/westhash only starts the difficulty at that diff, then it gets adjusted up or down by the server. What's the point of being able to specify a difficulty if in reality it will get set automatically by vardif?
There is Suppose to be a setting even on N/W hash that disables vardif , i remember reading it one time under the tips for miner link at the bottom of any page on W/NHash. If they still allow it not sure and you may have use a proxy thu them if it won't connect
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I agree if you set it at a set #, i would think it won't go below that DIFF, but it still does even my script miner that needs 4096 dif to run at top speed, drops as it adjusts.
Hmm, looks like I'll have to dig. Thanks for the tip.
Difficulty should be handled this way: No lower than user's set difficulty but can increase if set too low.
Unfortunately, our buyers still use low diff pools and some low diff coins require low pool diff. That is why we cannot keep high diffs (we want them, too, they put less load on our servers).
The main mistake is on ASIC hardware producers. They save 30 cents off each machine and buy slower controllers. As a result, ASICs are always only guaranteed to work fine with Bitcoin or Litecoin mining, where diff is very high, but altcoins can have very low diffs, resulting in many shares that controllers are incapable of processing fast enough. And without altcoins, there is no point in existance of renting services.
Thanks for the reply.
I don't see the issue with users who need low diff. What we're asking for is when we set diff manually (for example 16384) that it actually gets set to 16384 and doesn't go lower. Doesn't matter if your server decides to assign higher than 16384, the ASICs can handle that. What needs to happen is when a diff is set using d=xxxxx, the server only sends xxxxx diff shares or higher. Right now, I've got the rig set to d=32768, and it starts at 16384 for some reason and then drops as low as 512 which totally kills the ASIC because it can't handle such low diff work. The way I understand it is that your difficulty option is broken. Fixing it to the way I'm describing would not affect low diff users, they could still set d=512 or let vardiff adjust it by not specifying a d=xxx parameter.
The diff problem affects all my ASICs: S4, SP20, A2 Terminator, Titan, and Alcheminer 256MH. I've never bothered bringing the issue up since all of them can deal with the low diff shares, but the Achemist totally craps its self with low diff. Makes it unusable on nicehash, but when the diff does manage to stay high it works just fine.
I hope I described the problem well enough, and I hope you can fix your code to lock in a specified difficulty when set by the user.
Oh, I agree with manufacturers being ridiculous with the underpowered controllers. The Alchemist miner never sees above ~35% CPU usage though.