Greetings Miners!
After some discussion and pouring over the data, it has come to my attention that the Eligius pool is using a LOT of bandwidth. So, in an effort to mitigate this somewhat, I'm going to be making some minor changes.
First, I've temporarily disabled secure stratum (mining.get_transactions) to save a bit. We were outputting anywhere from 50-125MB of data per stratum work restart (every 55 seconds), and thats pretty crazy.
Second, and this is more long term, I'm going to be giving each mining protocol it's own host name so that I can associate each with it's own IP address, if needed.
So, I'm going to shoot for roughly two weeks from now (weekend of June 1st) to implement the following:
- Secure and Blind Stratum mining on stratum+tcp://stratum.mining.eligius.st:3334 (or 3333)
- Getwork mining on http://mining.eligius.st:8337 will continue, and a new hostname, http://getwork.mining.eligius.st:8337 will be added for completeness. (I will also include the X-Stratum header to direct any stratum supporting getwork miners to the stratum protocol)
- GBT (getblocktemplate/decentralized) mining on it's own hostname and port, separate from getwork, at http://gbt.mining.eligius.st:9337 (note the port!)
- The existing default host, mining.eligius.st:8337, will continue to work and provide getwork only. Port 3334 of the same will work for some time, however I will be notifying those miners I can contact using that port to switch to the new host as soon as possible, and eventually, if needed, shut down 3334 on that host.
These changes are not yet in full effect, however the new hostnames and ports already exist so you can start updating your miner's configurations now.The major changes will take effect on or about the weekend of June 1, 2013.Currently GBT mining accounts for the majority of the pool's bandwidth usage. While I agree that GBT has a future, it definitely needs some tweaks to make it more viable for pooled mining long term. With block sizes near 1MB we're using near 1TB of bandwidth per day serving miners block templates, which is pretty crazy. GBT currently lacks a few things that would make it more viable, such as caching transaction data, binary protocol (not ASCII-hex), etc, so that bandwidth usage is closer to that of other protocols. GBT currently supports gzip compression, however, which will make it even more useful once there is some caching in place.
Secure stratum suffers from similar drawbacks, and even more so than GBT because the updates are more frequent, and there is no compression at all. So, it uses huge bursts of bandwidth every minute or so.
Both ideals are great for bitcoin I believe, however some more client-side verification of the data (against a local bitcoind, or manual inspection even) seems like a prerequisite to keeping the protocols as the default for mining, as there is no real difference to the miner at this point in time in which protocol they choose aside from bandwidth usage (lowest currently being blind-stratum).
So, I'm not disabling any of the protocols, I just need to be able to delegate resources more accurately, which requires partitioning the protocols to their own hostnames.
I will do my best to make sure no miner is cut off from these changes by making the existing mining.eligius.st:8337/3334 address support both getwork and stratum for as long as possible, but,
please update your miner configurations as soon as possible to reflect the new hostnames above, depending on your preference of protocol.
Secure stratum will remain disabled until these changes are in full effect. I will keep an eye on the adoption of the new hostnames and if it seems too many miners will be negatively effected by a change, I will revisit this.
Any questions/comments/concerns, please feel free to reply or contact me otherwise.
Thank you again for flying Eligius Mining Airlines!
-wk