Nicely done on the recent updates, HA. I've been running pretty darn smooth for the past 4-5 days. Normally I'd have some sort of miner crash that would cause some heartache (usually in the middle of the night while sleeping), but I've been running quite smooth the last few days with no major issues at all. I really like the recent improvements with the GPU Manager, additional miners added, etc.
I do have some feedback/questions for consideration with your ongoing development:
1) You're valiant efforts at trying to maintain a level head despite the criticism here/communication issues are not going unnoticed lol. Try not to get too bogged down in it; you are very loyal to your users but have to draw a line somewhere.
Thank you. I sincerely appreciate the support. Trying to provide support to an international user base can be challenging, especially given the constraints of message boards and misunderstandings in language use. I'm looking into setting up a Discord channel to make it easier to provide support.
2) Just downloaded 1.8.6 this morning. Some time after benchmarking the new ccminer-phi and nanashi algos, I got a message saying that both algorithms cannot communicate with ahashpool while trying to mine lyra2v2, and would stop mining with those miners. Looking at the benchmarks now, it seems those miners benched higher than tpruvot and thus won out. Not sure what the issue here is, but say it's a fix on your end...does HA go back and try using those miners again at some other time to see if the issue is fixed, or do I need to manually rebenchmark at some point?
If the miners were benchmarked, then they must have installed correctly and can be started by the software, so the software shouldn't have blocked the miners unless it encountered a number of errors. I tried mining Lyra2v2 on AHashPool with both miners and there doesn't seem to be any incompatibilities. That leads me to think your issue was a temporary communications issue with that pool. The software will stop mining on a pool if too many communication errors occur and then try the pool again after an hour. However, there may have been a cascading error that caused the software to block each miner due to these communication errors in addition to blocking the pool. I'll have to dig a little deeper into recreating that situation and see if there may be some path in the logic that causes both error types to be triggered. Currently the software won't automatically attempt to reuse blocked miners because it assumes those issues can't be resolved without user intervention. If you restart the software, the Preferred Miner for those algorithms shouldn't have changed because the list of blocked miners is maintained separately. If a preferred miner did change for whatever reason, you can manually change the Preferred Miner using the drop-down list instead of having to re-benchmark.
3) Side note from a few versions back when you reenabled alexis, and this is also in response to others posting on this thread...I do realize alexis benches higher sometimes but HA is right that it is inherently unstable. It crashes for me (not all the time, on occasion). I disabled it on all algos and no issues with crashes anymore...I had to check the logs to figure out why the hell HA would crash in the middle of the night and miss out on several hours of mining. Alexis was it.
I'm sure you've picked up on some of my skepticism about some older mining software in the past. If it wasn't for the significant boost in performance for certain algorithms, I wouldn't have bothered with it. I had a rig that would crash once a day always on Alexis, always on the same card, but with different algorithms. It was a 1080ti with a slight overclock. Once I removed the overclock on just that card for only the few algorithms that use Alexis, I stopped having issues. You may need to watch CCMiner-Phi for similar reasons because it based on the Alexis code base.
4) Real life scenario here of helping me understand the new GPU manager. So a couple days ago I recently did a full refresh on all benchmarks, saved it as a profile in the GPU manager, and let it go. Now, after having updated to 1.8.6 with new miners to benchmark...are those results going to get added back in to my template in the GPU manager? Right now it's not looking like they are auto added back, and I'm confused on the appropriate way to go about doing that that doesn't override all the actual rate benchmarks for my 8 GPUs that have been accumulating since the template creation. Here is my guess at how to do this..please tell me if I am right. A) in the GPU manager go to benchmarks section, B) copy benchmarks in from GPU0 and in the bottom "Apply template to these devices" click GPU0 ONLY, C) repeat the same operation from GPUs 1-7 one by one, then resave the template.
Keep up the good work.
I really need to type up a document about the GPU Manager; we programmers don't like taking time to write documentation, but it definitely makes things easier for everyone. My apologies for any misunderstandings about the feature's use. The design intent was to make it easy to copy the same set of settings to multiple devices, so a template only contains a single set of settings, not a separate list of settings for each device. If you were to copy benchmark data from multiple devices, then the template will only have the data from the last device and not the other seven. If you wanted to save benchmark data for each card, you would unfortunately need a separate template for each GPU. If you want to backup your existing benchmark data, you could copy the individual GPUx.xml files in your Hash Auger directory instead of creating templates.
The benchmark data really complicates what should be a relatively simple process otherwise - in some scenarios users want it copied so they don't have to benchmark all devices and in other cases the hash rate data should be ignored because it would overwrite existing data that may not apply to a card. The Include Hash Rates option handles both cases when copying the data from a template, but that doesn't apply to updating the template itself. Currently, the software adds any missing miners and algorithms to a template that was created before the miners/algorithms were added, but it doesn't try to copy hash rates from any device when it does so - leaving the hash rates for the new miners/algorithms as zero on the template itself unless you use the Copy button like you mentioned.
If you are trying to prevent existing benchmark data from being overwritten, then you should be able to use the GPU Manager without the Include Hash Rates option enabled. When that option is off, the copy process doesn't overwrite the hash rates on the device, but it may reset the preferred miner if one of the new miners is now the preferred miner on the device and not on the template. I'll need to think about how to handle that facet in a way that doesn't further complicate the process. I can already foresee situations where the Preferred Miner should be recalculated and other times when the user doesn't want it to be changed.