Lately, we are seeing more and more miners upgrading their mining hardware to take advantage of the larger ASIC machines and mining hash rates. We think this is a great move and one we want to ensure our P2PoolMining Nodes support for the long-haul.
However, with all the extra power coming into the mining arena for DASH, we are seeing a couple of issues arising.
- The mining difficulty is growing based on these higher hashrates
- Mis-configured miners are causing issues with our P2Pool nodes
We wanted to address both of these concerns, so we have implemented some modifications to the P2Pool Software our P2PoolMining Nodes are running. Here is a recap of the recent changes we have implemented.
Growing Mining Difficulty
If you refer to the two graphs below you will see that all of this extra ASIC hash rate has caused an exponential growth in the difficulty levels over the past month and year.
This chart shows the difficulty rise for the last Month.
This chart shows the difficulty rise for the last year.
Look at the chart for the month of July, as you can see from the chart, the Difficulty level has nearly doubled in less than 45 days.
In the simplest terms – Difficulty is a variable that is used in the mining calculation to regulate the speed that new blocks are found. When hash rates go up, difficulty rises in conjunction to ensure the smooth generation of DASH blocks from mining hash rates.
This rise in difficulty directly reflects the higher hash rates that we are seeing in the miners connecting to our P2Pool nodes. Therefore, we have recently implemented a couple of optimization changes that have been suggested by the DASH FORUM user – TheLazier.
The optimization changes that have been suggested by TheLazier will likely be merged into the next release of the Official P2Pool software for DASH. However, we felt that these changes were significant enough for us to warrant implementing them now ahead of the next release.
You can see an overview of these changes and the “Pull Request” TheLazier opened with the official release on GitHub (DASH P2Pool Suggested Improvements).
We implemented these changes a few weeks back and have been testing these changes, on one of our nodes, for several weeks now. We have seen an improvement in the node efficiency and miner payouts due to these changes. Therefore, we chose to roll these out to all of our P2Pool nodes.
Mis-Configured Miners
With larger miners, comes larger responsibility requiring you to ensure that your hash rates and the hash rates of others are not impacted adversely due to poorly configured miners.
Several of the ASIC miner manufacturers have offered suggestions to miner owners of tweaks they can do to improve their miner's performance. Sadly, not all mining operators implement these tweaks correctly. Thus, impacting not only their own miner, but the miners of others operating on the same pool.
Therefore, we have implemented some safe guards to check for miner settings that fall outside of the recommended ranges based on the miner's own hash rate. The changes specifically impact the use of yourdashaddress/xx and yourdashaddress+xx parameters.
All of our P2Pool nodes have been optimized to provide the best performance and payouts available.
We will update our FAQ's on these settings in the next few days.
Summary
That wraps up the recent optimizations we have completed. If you have any questions about any of these recent changes feel free to leave your comments below.
As always, we appreciate your patronage and strive to make your mining efforts enjoyable and as profitable as possible!
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