TexasUnraid

So pooling was delayed again? I thought they had a meeting on the 2nd and it was going to go live a week or so later? Hmm, might need to look into hpool myself.

Ah, ok yeah I think that is the plan for a lot of people. I will be doing the same thing. Why waste these plots until I need the space.

With how the network is growing, I am going 100% into pools but I can see why someone would solo mine as well. I just fear solo mining for a year only for the network to grow to the point it takes 10 years to win vs getting paid regularly from a pool. I am guessing the network goes over 100-200Eib in short order, not sure where it will level off at though. I am basing most of my calculations around that number for the time being.

lol, I also have 81 plots at this point from my testing. Now that pools are about to go live I want to get everything squared away so I can jump on board. You have signed up for the free 100 mojos so that you can join a pool right?

Yeah, I plan to do that, first negative I have left on ebay in like 10 years if it comes to that (had someone pull something similar with a welder that I won for less then he wanted to sell it for). Hopefully they just send the drives, I know they have them and my planned setup is based around them. I would also find it a lot harder to do chia if I was murdering SSD's in the process lol.

so basically it appears there is an inverse relationship between buckets and memory? Surprised I have not seen anyone else mention using lower buckets / more memory. Particularly with machines that are core or drive limited, seems like you would want to maximize memory usage. I just got plotman synced up and setup on both machines. Basically in a holding pattern at this point, I had to move the 4tb drives into the main server, they are replacing a pool in unraid and using the old drives in the garage server but they are more storage drives, not plotting. Waiting for the 10k sas drives to arrive but the seller might be trying to jerk me around. They took the listing of 10 for $7 down a few hours after I purchased it and then re-listed the drives individually for $20 a pop. Been 2 weeks now and it still has not shipped. I sent them a message and they gave me a line about being out of stock but I sent them back links of dozens or possibly hundreds of drives with the same part numbers currently listed on their store. Waiting on a reply now. Same store tried to screw me over by adding shipping cost to items out of the blue and if you order multiple items the total shipping cost was more then buying them in sets of 2. When sent a message multiple times I was just told "this is our shipping price now". Sad, they used to be one of my go to ebay stores, generally had good deals if you dug through their listings. If they want to raise the price, so be it, sucks I missed out, such is the case of an HBA from them I had my eye one for awhile that went from $90 with cables to $240 without cables. This is a really scummy way of doing things though IMHO. /rant.

Makes sense, just surprised how many times I got lucky lol. I have had some pretty jank setups on UPS's over the years (part of why they were unpluged so many times lol).

Interesting, in all my years I never knew that or experienced that. I will admit I have unplugged a UPS countless times over the years for various reasons and never had an issue. Course most of the UPS's I have worked with are consumer grade units with desktops.

Bingo, the wallet is not synced. I just assumed that everything was synced together.

Now that it is synced, got a strange issue. I signed up for the 100 free mojo so I would be able to join a pool. In the main chia program it shows this in my wallet. In the docker though it shows 0? Fingerprint matches. The really strange part is I could of sworn that it shows the 100 mojo when I checked it earlier?

Most of the managing advice I have seen says to ignore time and instead focus on phases. E.G. start another plot when current plot reaches phase 2, start another parallel plot when the first plot reaches phase 4 etc. I did some testing with timing and 10 minutes is not nearly enough in my experience. I tried 2-3 hour splits (was trying to time it around when phase 1 would finish) and saw some good results at first but like you as more plots were added the times slowed down and they didn't actually leave phase 1 before starting the next plot. Watching the drive usage, phase 1 and 2 seem to have very different drive usage patterns. phase one is a lot of steady state usage vs phase 2 is a lot of read/writing alternating. Plotman handles all of this automatically, I will be using this docker to handle things: Says it works on windows, might try setting that up, also handles multiple machines and setting up plotters vs harvesters etc.

I am finally synced! lol After clearing app-data and restarting the whole process it took it about 2 days to sync and it is now up to date. It was interesting seeing the network space grow over time, it went parabolic this month. Wonder what it will level off at? 100Eib? 200?

I sort of figured it out, planning on trying that after it finishes syncing when setting up the 2nd server.

lol, guess just got to wait until it is finished and see what the final numbers are.

I can totally see them doing that, my concern is that they will then start putting those in the external dives due to being cheaper and screw us shuckers. At least right now we know that over 8TB is going to be a CMR drive. It would be nice to think something would take pressure off the supply chain but trying to buy a GPU for the last 6 months has made me realize that is not happening anytime soon. Just too many mouths to feed and not enough to go around. Kinda like the stunt nvida is pulling with the mining limited GPU's, it won't make a difference in the big picture but does reduce actual gamers ability to mine in their spare time (like me on my old vega 56).

got to love playing a game of "will this trip the breaker" My old house causes this game to be a daily event in our life lol.

Interesting results on phase 1, not sure what to make of it yet. Too bad you can't log the CPU/memory usage in tandem with the plot times, could give a good window into what is going on. I do not envy working on old gear, the oldest I will mess with now days is sandy bridge, older then that is just not worth the time and hassle for me anymore. That said most of my non-gaming computers are sand/ivy bridge. I will take any of these over what we had to deal with back in the 90's. You can almost forget the nightmares of trying to find drivers, install them and then troubleshoot why they are not working. Guys now days take for granted just being able to plug something in and have it work at least to some degree. Think I finally got my back plane issues sorted out, I have no idea what happened or what fixed it though, I hate that. Waiting for chia to finish syncing and then going to reboot and get back to testing.

Well, after another day of waiting I decided to start over, I cleared the appdata and reinstalled the docker. It started syncing again and it has officially surpassed the point the last one was stuck! lol

Interesting, so you are running 16p32t? or 32p64t? Are you maxing out cpu/ram/hdd at this point or still got more headroom?

I am still debating how I am going to do it but most likely will use pools vs the array. The array is nice for files for one reason and one reason only IMHO. The ability to loose a drive and only loose what was on that drive. If this is a dedicated unraid license for chia, then the array could work. Particularly without a parity drive. Although after that you would have to move to pools anyways, so might as well start out there IMHO. If you will be having a bunch of drives, you can run in raid 5 so you have some redundancy although it wastes some space. You could do raid0 but if you loose a drive you loose everything. Alternatively you can use unassigned devices and just setup the drives individually. I am debating this method or pools. Most likely used a raid5 pool for all my small drives as the wasted space will not be that much and some redundancy would be nice as I don't trust those. Also there would be a lot of wasted space without raid anyways. For the larger drives still debating.

Very interesting, I will have to try cutting the buckets down as well since I have plenty of extra memory.

What do the buckets do, I keep meaning to figure out that setting. I am trying to figure out what my backplane in the jbod seems to be limited to 600mb/s when I was expecting 1.2gb/s. It is the supermicro sas1 backplane. I got it for free and figured I might be able to put it to use. Edit: Ok, really strange, I swapped from 8x SSD's to some random drives and now getting more total bandwidth? Up around 800mb/s but think that is the limit of the drives. Very odd. Guess I will have to wait for the sas drives to show up to really test it.

interesting results, further shows that parallel is king. Wonder what would happen if you over-provisioned the CPU with 16p2t or even 4t. If you staggered the plots you could do 4-6t pretty easily I am guessing since the later phases would not be competing the threads.

look into the Machinaris docker on unraid / Linux. Think I settled on using it for long term plotting and has plotman built in. Also uses a webgui so you can manage multiple systems easily. Also setup for harvesting/plotting (basically a much better method of using multiple computers like you). I will run it on unriad for my main machine and then just use an ubuntu install on the rest with portainer and machinaris most likely. Apparently it runs on windows as well.

The plot managers out there (plotman being one of them), will automatically kick of the next plot when entering phase 4 IIRC (the coping stage) and can be tuned to whatever you want. With careful tuning it is indeed possible to overprovision a drive/ram/CPU. Takes trial and error though. With a 300gb drive there is not much room for error that is for sure. On linux I use netdata to log everything so I can go back and see the peak ram/cpu/disk usage and adjust accordingly. Makes it pretty easy, at least in theory once I get the new setup working. With staggered plots pretty sure I can have a fair amount more running then I would think. The issue will be iops of the drives at that point. Just got the cable in for the jbod and testing that today, it is a sas1 backplane so limited to around ~1.2gb/s but gonna test that. I have a sas2 backplane and/or an expander I could use instead but don't really want to move those unless I have to. Expanders went from $18 everywhere to $65 and hard to find in the last week!