Because of the variance in success and some quirks of the search, here's a patch to let people have a little more visibility into how the miner is doing:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/rie_log.patchTo use, download the miner source and
cd (your-source-directory)
patch < rie_log.patch
You should see log output whenever the miner finds a chain of length 2 or longer.
Look for roughly a 10x difference in length 2, length 3, ..., blocks in your output log over time. If you're *not* seeing any length N chains -- because, e.g., you've broken something during optimizing -- then you know something is wrong.
I've found that the rate of generating length 2 or 3 chains is a good backup benchmark to use.
Gatra, please feel free to have full ownership of the patch - I release any copyright claims to it - if you want to include it or something like it in the default miner.
-Dave
