CPPSRB processing questions?
I read the FAQs on CPPSRB and the payment que but still have a question about something that happened recently.
I had an unpaid balance of about 0.09 BTC with my minimum payout set to 0.1 BTC when I had to shut down my miners. After going inactive I changed my minimum to 0.05 to get into the que. Soon I did get into the que and quickly made it to the "less than 25 BTC" position or the top block. I was expecting to get paid in the next block or two. But, for the next 3 days I kept on shifting between positions 45 to 70 in that top block and did not get paid. After the 3 day inactivity I started mining again at a lower hash rate and soon got paid. I read in the FAQs about the last-in first-paid and figured this had something to do with others jumping in front of me in the que but I'm hoping someone can fill in more detail by answering the following questions:
Question 1: Did I just go inactive at the wrong time when there was something wrong with the que function?
Question 2: Assuming all is working normal, would I have gotten paid sooner if I didn't start mining again after 3 days of inactivity, or did restarting speed payment up?
Question 3: If I wouldn't have restarted mining (after 3 days of inactivity), or just stayed inactive, about when would I have been paid (rough estimate, 2 weeks, 2 months, 6 months)?
Note: I was at about the 4.8 day time when I started remining at a lower hash rate.
Question 4: What causes someone to stay in the que for over 6 months like we're seeing today with a balance > 0.16 BTC?
Changing your minimum when you're not actively mining, or when you're already above the new minimum, might not behave entirely as expected. I think I remember there being something about the system taking a while to update your minimum in the back-end, after you change it.
1) Perhaps. Sometimes orphan blocks can cause this kind of problem. You're set to be paid in the next block, and we find a block, so the system thinks you're paid, but then it's orphaned and you have to be added back into the system again. So this can screw things up sometimes when you're very close to getting paid. (Note: I don't know that this is what happens for sure; I've never seen information from wizkid or Luke-jr about this behavior; but it makes sense, given the way that payouts are handled.)
2) Unknown, but it shouldn't have really made much of a difference. If you were constantly being pushed back in the queue when it looked like you were in the next block, you might have just been unlucky in terms of being at a threshold where some folks kept jumping in the queue ahead of you.
3) I think it usually takes a manual payout by wizkid to pay out to inactive miners. This used to happen more frequently, but I think that it is happening less frequently now that he fixed the CPPSRB system so that it does not go into failsafe mode as frequently. In any case, on the order of a couple of weeks or so, although possibly faster. I think that mine took 10 days when I stopped mining.
4) It looks like they might be an intermittent miner. Maybe they only use Eligius as failover/backup. Right now it looks like they mined for ~12 hours in June 11, ~12 hours on June 12, some hours on June 13, all at a pretty stable hash rate. So maybe they just hadn't mined at Eligius for 6 months (so no payment since then), then they mined as a backup for a couple of days, and it's just taken until now for them to reach the top of the queue, for whatever reason. It looks like they changed their payout minimum to .05 BTC on June 11. So again maybe there is some delay for the updated minimum to "take" in the system. For reference:
http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1DB2SWYVpqAbde7aqmcqFfNjsRTkeEbGN9
normally when it goes down that far there is a spike upwards...
