Invalid Hashrate

TimboSlice

Hi all, just started mining FTC part time along with ETH. I may have followed @greenuser over here from the ETH forums :smiley: and figured it would be a good idea to diversify my mining a bit.
I got set up mining just fine at just over 1 MH using nsgminer and The Blocks Factory FTC Pool, however, I have what seems to be a bit high of an invalid hashrate and reject rate. My reject rate according to the miner is around 10%, it seems like it’s sometimes slow to get new work and hashes on an old block, gets rejected, then gets new work.
The invalid hashrate according to the pool bounces anywhere from 10%-20%.

So a few questions;

Are the reject rate at the miner and invalid hashrate at the pool connected?
Are these percentage high or normal? They seem high to me.
Any suggestions on how to fix?

My .bat file for the miner just has the -g 1 -w 128 -I 16 variables, but honestly I don’t know what they do besides the intensity.

I haven’t had time to play around with different pools yet, but I likely will this weekend at some point.

Thanks!

wrapper

@ghostlander

Hi @TimboSlice sorry to hear you are having issues.

You are the first couple of “New FTC miners” using NSGminer so I’m afraid you’re trailblazing. @greenuser needs a more out of the box experience, which we are / have been doing a lot of work to try to provide …

Someone will need more details about your system to help. 1 MHash/sec sounds high (for Neoscrypt)

Make/ model of card
Driver installed
Operating system

If you are about today, you could try, p2pool as a fail over, I can see how it’s working. Check its not a Pool problem / try other settings.

YourFTCAddress

View charts on http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:19327/static

Possible issue : Pool compatibility

NSGminer has not been made compatible with Multipool mining.

That is mainly because of the extraordinary large proportion of Feathercoin development effort having to be put into defense against Coin Switching algorithms.

Ghostlander has spent over 6 months that I know of working on speeding up NSGminer over SGminer used by the Multipool “Algorithm switchers”.

The Coin switcher pools use the weakness of POW algorithm that current mining difficulty is set at the “Last Block”. This means they can sweep in when the difficulty goes down and mine coins as fast as they can before the difficulty goes up.

Here is the last analysis I did how how eHRC is current performing during some maximum stress to the FTC network due to multipool switching.

https://github.com/wrapperband/FTCBlockTimeAnalysis

This means the time difference between the blocks varies more than it should do and leaves the remaining miners with high difficulty mining.

Whereas this effect did happen in Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, it had a greater effect with Alternate coins where, although FTC had good level of miners there were always 10 times more in Litecoin, some of which could “coin switch” and suddenly by a large proportion of FTC miners.

So, that is why FTC invented eHRC (enhanced Hash Rate Compensation), hard forked to have One minute blocks and why you have to use the Multipools own miners at the moment.

If that is not the issue then :

Other current issues

We are still also testing NSGminer especially the windows builds it seems. There are a couple of issues that cause occasional problems, Ghostlander needs more information to work on.

Causes system crash if you close down by [Q] on some operating system AMD drivers.

Work around - Close with terminal / window close button

Hangs on Failover or loss of connection on some Operating system / Driver combinations.

Work around - add plenty of other pools if connection lost

Does not return from failover sometimes, on Operating system / Driver combinations.

Workaround : ensure failover pools, check if fault apparent on system

Unknown issue with Windows build, awaiting further details (we’re mostly Linux)

RIPPEDDRAGON

@TimboSlice said:

Hi all, just started mining FTC part time along with ETH. I may have followed @greenuser over here from the ETH forums :smiley: and figured it would be a good idea to diversify my mining a bit.
I got set up mining just fine at just over 1 MH using nsgminer and The Blocks Factory FTC Pool, however, I have what seems to be a bit high of an invalid hashrate and reject rate. My reject rate according to the miner is around 10%, it seems like it’s sometimes slow to get new work and hashes on an old block, gets rejected, then gets new work.
The invalid hashrate according to the pool bounces anywhere from 10%-20%.

So a few questions;

Are the reject rate at the miner and invalid hashrate at the pool connected?

Are these percentage high or normal? They seem high to me.

Any suggestions on how to fix?

My .bat file for the miner just has the -g 1 -w 128 -I 16 variables, but honestly I don’t know what they do besides the intensity.

I haven’t had time to play around with different pools yet, but I likely will this weekend at some point.

Thanks!

Try a few other pools, from my experience mining with them I had a higher % of stales and 20% lower payout than average…

I will always promote mining on FTC’s p2pool network for best results:
http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de/

wrapper

@TimboSlice - What other adjustments can I try?

Generally excessive rejects point to I 16 being too high, but after trying other pools.

You can try g = 2

and try w = 256

GPU W or Width is a power of 2 so you could see what 64 gives also.

Even the same cards can have slight tweeks, generally it is best to let NSGminer set your card (copy the old nsgminer.conf), you can read what the defaults are from your nsgminer.conf file.

The .bin file created also is auto adapted to the card spec, like engine speed.

TimboSlice

Thanks for the replies!
I’m running 1x MSI R9 390 and 2x Sapphire R7 370’s on windows 7 with the AMD 15.12 drivers installed, as those were the ones that work best with ETH mining. IIRC, the 390 is hashing at ~580kh or 630kh and the 370’s are hashing at ~250kh or 300kh, depending on if I have them overclocked or not.
The problem might be due to having two different types of cards running on the same miner, since the 390 is so much faster than the 370’s, but they work fine with ETH mining and I haven’t had a chance to only run one type of card at a time yet.
I’ll try out the P2pool this weekend and mess around with only having one type or card running at a time and the other variable options.

Can the intensity be changed/lowered in NSGMiner? I tried to lower and raise it but it never seemed to actually affect the intensity.

wrapper

@TimboSlice Intensity is max 13 for NDGminer on some cards, it works for me on the Linux.

ghostlander

Intensity of 16 requires 2^16*32=2097152 Kbytes of video memory. That’s 2Gb. It can be lowered and raised back on the fly.

TimboSlice

So good news, I switched over to a P2Pool (http://p2pool.neoscrypt.de:19327/static/) and my stale and reject rates are a lot lower, around that 2-4% range. I also dropped the intensity to 15 and that seemed to help a ton, although the 370’s are 4gb and the 390 is 8gb, so they in theory should be good at 16, but I’ll take consistency over a higher rate. The drop in intensity did lower the 390 to 560 from 630 though, but the 370’s dropped to around 280 a piece. I’ll have to figure out which one is best for the long run.
I’ll be mining ETH mostly since it’s more profitable and stable, but I’m definitely willing to help out to make NSGminer better in any way I can.

I do have a few more questions;

Who runs all the P2Pools? Does no one, since they’re, well, P2P? Are they all technically the same pool, so it doesn’t matter which one I hash on, all the pools P2P pools are working on the same block and share the payout? I’m located in the US so it makes more sense to connect to a US pool, but the Germany pool was linked and it felt weird hashing on a pool by myself.
Are the stale % (P2Pool) and the invalid % (The Blocks Factory Pool) the same thing?
Is the Reject rate I see in NSG miner the same as the stale/invalid percentages?
Is the 2-4% range for rejects/stale/whatever a good number?

Thanks for the help!

Wellenreiter

@TimboSlice

First of all, welco!e to Feathercoin and the forum.

For your questions:

The p2pool nodes are operated by different forum members. They all build one virtual pool that works on the same block and shares the payouts. You can setup one pool node as primary and another one as secondary, and if yoir moner needs to switch, you keep your payouts
I think yes
yes
yes

TimboSlice

@Wellenreiter said:

@TimboSlice

First of all, welco!e to Feathercoin and the forum.

For your questions:

The p2pool nodes are operated by different forum members. They all build one virtual pool that works on the same block and shares the payouts. You can setup one pool node as primary and another one as secondary, and if yoir moner needs to switch, you keep your payouts

I think yes

yes

yes

Thanks for the answers! I figured that’s how it all worked, but getting confirmation is nice.