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Topic: Why does the BFL Single produce ~50% stales with P2Pool? (Read 3240 times)

legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1060
no one really knows sadly, but there is a printed document that does say their warranty, look for that in previous pages
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60586.500
hero member
Activity: 481
Merit: 502
yeah those are boring questions which are in the forums

Well I heard it was 6 months warranty but I wanted it confirming by them first.

Also the delivery times which BFL say (4-6 weeks?) and the forums say (2-3 months?) vary wildly so I was hoping to get some kind of solid estimation of that also.
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1060
yeah those are boring questions which are in the forums
hero member
Activity: 481
Merit: 502
I've had 3 since I ordered yesterday, but maybe he likes to answer order emails quicker. Did you rant or ask a lot of questions?

No doubt!
I asked two questions about warranty and delivery times. So no, not really.
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1060
I've had 3 since I ordered yesterday, but maybe he likes to answer order emails quicker. Did you rant or ask a lot of questions?
hero member
Activity: 481
Merit: 502
Sonny is so nice in the emails tho. He really needs to hire someone off odesk tho asap.
I haven't had a reply to my email yet so I wouldn't know...  Roll Eyes
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1060
Sonny is so nice in the emails tho. He really needs to hire someone off odesk tho asap.
hero member
Activity: 481
Merit: 502
Wow, they are clueless, they are losing on $2,400 here
You make me laugh. There are people lined up down the street, pre-paying for something that will take forever to arrive (as of now), and have ordered so many that they are already on rev3, and you think your non-order will affect something? Not to mention those that have already plunked down 25, 60, 100+k for rig boxes.

Any business that neglects smaller customers and only focusing on taking orders for larger customers will eventually fail. You're forgetting they're missing out on all the smaller customers that would become possible bigger customers that order more products like the rig box.

Their customer service is appauling and they're losing out on money. Simple as that. ~$4k isn't exactly pocket change even if a couple of people have already pre-ordered rig boxes...
hero member
Activity: 588
Merit: 500
Hero VIP ultra official trusted super staff puppet
Wow, they are clueless, they are losing on $2,400 here
You make me laugh. There are people lined up down the street, pre-paying for something that will take forever to arrive (as of now), and have ordered so many that they are already on rev3, and you think your non-order will affect something? Not to mention those that have already plunked down 25, 60, 100+k for rig boxes.

Meh. Money is money.

EDIT: I do question how much money and time(money) it would take them to make the necessary changes...that's assuming they haven't already been made  Kiss
rjk
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
1ngldh
Wow, they are clueless, they are losing on $2,400 here
You make me laugh. There are people lined up down the street, pre-paying for something that will take forever to arrive (as of now), and have ordered so many that they are already on rev3, and you think your non-order will affect something? Not to mention those that have already plunked down 25, 60, 100+k for rig boxes.
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1060
Wow, they are clueless, they are losing on $2,400 here
hero member
Activity: 481
Merit: 502
Has this/will this be fixed soon?

Ask BFL. But until now they didn't seem to care at all?

It'd be in their best interests to fix it, as I'm not purchasing until they do, so that's about $1300 they're losing out on atleast.

Hopefully it won't take long (unfortunately I can't say the same about their delivery times...)
legendary
Activity: 1795
Merit: 1208
This is not OK.
Has this/will this be fixed soon?

Ask BFL. But until now they didn't seem to care at all?

at some point they did inquire about this. So they may well be working on something.
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 500
FPGA Mining LLC
Has this/will this be fixed soon?

Ask BFL. But until now they didn't seem to care at all?
legendary
Activity: 2912
Merit: 1060
Has this/will this be fixed soon?
member
Activity: 90
Merit: 10
The longer it is, the better will be your efficiency. But all pools (except for P2Pool) usually send important (non-sendold) long polls at the same time, so as long as you aren't using P2Pool you just don't have to care if your miner software supports sendold and the pool is working correctly.

There is always some overhead but at 10 min LP the overhead causes ~1% higher stale rate. 

At 10 second LP the overhead is more like a ~30%+ higher stale rate.

The Seven is right about "submitold",  For pools with merge mining if they are using "submitold" extension then it shouldn't have any worse stale rate than a non merge mining pool (on the BTC chain, NMC chain would be ~3% higher stales).  Also there are a couple ways BFL could "fix" the long interval.  Some are better than others.  Since BFL Singles use encrypted bitstreams only BFL can fix it (if they want to).  There is nothing at the miner or pool level that can fix it.

Thanks for the explanation guys, much appreciated.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
There is always some overhead but at 10 min LP the overhead causes ~1% higher stale rate. 

At 10 second LP the overhead is more like a ~30%+ higher stale rate.

The Seven is right about "submitold",  For pools with merge mining if they are using "submitold" extension then it shouldn't have any worse stale rate than a non merge mining pool (on the BTC chain, NMC chain would be ~3% higher stales).  Also there are a couple ways BFL could "fix" the long interval.  Some are better than others.  Since BFL Singles use encrypted bitstreams only BFL can fix it (if they want to).  There is nothing at the miner or pool level that can fix it.
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 500
FPGA Mining LLC
The longer it is, the better will be your efficiency. But all pools (except for P2Pool) usually send important (non-sendold) long polls at the same time, so as long as you aren't using P2Pool you just don't have to care if your miner software supports sendold and the pool is working correctly.
member
Activity: 90
Merit: 10
Most conventional pools have an LP time of 10 minutes.  They never LP except on a block change.  Pools which merge mine (like Bitminter) have an LP interval of ~ 3 minutes (LP on BTC block change and roughly 2.5 LTC block changes per 10 minutes).

Pools could have more frequent LP and it is possible that at some point in the future LP could be used to update tx list when high value (fee) tx come in.  It is also possible BFL modifies their firmware to allow shorter intervals which eliminate the issue.

p2pool is kinda rare in that it has a VERY short LP interval and BFL single is kinda rare in that it has a very long batch interval.  That overlap is non-optimal.

sorry, not sure I completely understood the whole explanation.

Since the single works the whole nunce in 5 seconds what is the minimum LP interval the pool needs to have that is effective to mine on with the singles at this current time that would make the singles shine?
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 500
FPGA Mining LLC
The BFL Singles could actually report the shares asynchronously while still working on their current job, but their firmware is just too dumb to do that.
For regular pools the inefficiencies of this protocol cause the effective average valid hashrate to be around 1% below their nominal hashrate.
However for the P2Pool blockchain, which is ticking insanely fast, the effective average valid hashrate is around 26% below their nominal hashrate, just because of lacking asynchronous share reporting. Then there's relatively high latency due to polling and much overhead during work transmission, which hurts P2Pool badly as well. I, personally, don't have a BFL, so I don't have real-world measurements, but I'd say effective hashrate will be 40-60% below nominal, depending on how fast your host computer is, how aggressively the mining software is, connection latencies, etc.

BTW, the merged mining long polls don't count here because they should have set the "sendold" flag on pools/miners that support this.

TL;DR: They fucked up the firmware. Badly. In theory they can fix it though.
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