Posts made by Nadeah

From a quick look around, it seems a generous hash rate estimate for the 520M would be 15KH/s while running CudaMiner. Given the current mining difficulty of ~83 it would take on average about 275 days to find a single Feathercoin block (200 coins) while solo mining. If pool mining, it would take about 33 hours to earn one coin. It’s likely that the difficulty will continue increasing on into the foreseeable future (difficulty changes approximately every two days, depending on the rate of network growth).

Since the 520M is a mobile GPU, I’d advise against mining with it. It’s just my own opinion, but I don’t believe it would be worth it to mine with a laptop given the high likelihood of damage caused by overheating.

Thanks for the picture, it’s truly worth a thousand words! So much information there, where to start? :)

I notice you’re running version 2.11.3 of cgminer. While I doubt this has much to do with any of your issues, you might like to try the latest version, 3.1.0 and see if it makes any difference. Your rejected share rate seems quite high (79/(280+79)=.22 or 22%!). I think it may be caused by a mixture of a few things. You’ve a bit of stale shares interspersed here and there. I think changing your “expiry” setting from 120 down to say, 10 might make some difference here. Your GF (Getwork fail) and RF (Remote fail) numbers are good which should indicate that the pool is functioning well and your connection to it is good. Nonetheless, I find the seemingly high number of new blocks detected before longpoll a bit odd. I would think that could indicate the pool is being a bit slow in notifying you of new blocks which would cause some of the stale shares that you see.

Another major issue here is your number of hardware errors (seen as “HW:228” next to the GPU 0 stats). Ideally you should have none. If your card otherwise functions properly with no artifacting in games or on the desktop, I’d guess the hardware errors are simply caused by your cgminer settings. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with the 4850, but from a bit of research, it seems like you’re running at stock clock speeds so I doubt your hardware errors are caused by overclocking. Generally, in cgminer, hardware errors can be caused by setting a wrong thread-concurrency or intensity. You’ve not specified a thread-concurrency so it’s picking one automatically based on your number of shaders. cgminer may be guessing wrong. Additionally, your intensity of 10 is a bit low – sometimes low intensities can cause hardware errors. I took a look at the Litecoin mining hardware list and found some 4850s with their cgminer settings listed. :)

See the hardware comparison list here: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

For starters, I was surprised with the hashrates! It seems we should be able to get nearly double what you’re managing right now (and without hardware errors!). One of the cards is listed as using a thread-concurrency of 3200 (4*number of shaders). This looks like it might be a good starting point for testing. I’d also try an intensity of at least 13. Regardless of what this does with your hashrate, see if it at least gets rid of the hardware errors.

Here are some of the changes that I’d make to the configuration file that you posted above:

[b]“intensity” : “13”,[/b]
[b]“worksize” : “128”,[/b]
[b]“thread-concurrency” : “3200”,[/b]
[b]“expiry” : “10”,[/b]

You’ll likely have to do a bit of trial and error with the thread-concurrency and intensity. Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that any of these changes will have any positive impact, but with mining it’s all about testing, testing and more testing.

If you manage to work out the hardware errors, that should eliminate at least half (maybe more!) of your issues. :))

Once the hardware errors are sorted, I’d suggest doing a bit of testing at a different pool. I mine at fc.dontmine.me and really like it there. The pool uses stratum (a different type of mechanism for getting “work” from the pool) and so it does a very good job of knocking down the number of stale shares.

As for my hardware – it’s a secret! ;)

Really though, I’m mining with two 7970s and a 7950. My hashrate is around 1,900KH/s.

I like problem solving so it’s really no trouble at all working with you; in fact – it’s fun! Thanks for your responsiveness as well.

Good luck!

Hi again anbo!

In answering the last post I almost forgot that I wanted to reply to you, too! Your plan sounds like a good one. :)

Generally, you want your stale/reject rate to be less than 5%, preferably below 1%. I’ve been mining at fc.dontmine.me and I’m currently at 141961 accepted shares with only 471 rejected. That’s a .33% reject rate which is quite good. The pool generally shows my hashrate to be between ~200KH/s higher to ~100KH/s lower than what cgminer shows.

Something else occurred to me, but I don’t know if it’ll make any difference for you. Generally, the “worksize 256” option seems to fix the issue of pool KH/s not matching up – in your case it apparently doesn’t. :( But , I noticed that most people with your GPU (or any AMD 4000 series) seem to run worksize 128. I don’t really know if it’ll change anything or not but you could just give it a try, I suppose.

Good luck :))

Hello BarrowHill,

I don’t see anything that really stands out as an issue in your configuration file. Comparing it to mine (with a different GPU, but similar options), the only major difference that I can see is my config includes a line: “kernel” : “scrypt” just under the “worksize” option. Honestly, I don’t know if this is necessary or not, since your configuration already specifies “scrypt” : true. Either way, mine has both specified.

That said, I don’t really have any ideas what could be causing your problem. Luckily, there is something that you can try in order to possibly gain more insight into the problem. Modify your cgminer command line from the current “cgminer -T” to “cgminer -T -D --verbose 2>errorlog.txt” and give the program another run. After it finishes loading, let it run just a few more seconds and then you can close it out. Next, open up the errorlog.txt file that was created in the cgminer folder and have a look around in there for anything that looks like a relevant error message.

If you find anything interesting in the way of an error message, take it to Google and see what he says. :)

Sorry I can’t really help more, I’ve not ever had an issue like yours. Please let us know if you figure anything out!

Hi anbo,

Nothing wrong with 50KH/s, all we can do is make the best of what we’ve got! ;)

You’re right; since you’re using a configuration file you won’t need to specify all of these settings on the command line. Taking a quick look at your config file, I don’t see anything glaringly wrong. I wonder, what is your number of accepts/rejects (or the rate) in cgminer? It could be that the pool is rejecting a large number of your shares. Are you getting any hardware errors?

If hardware errors are the issue, you’ll need to do a bit of tweaking between the intensity and thread-concurrency and possibly clockspeeds/voltages. If that’s not the case, but you’re getting a high number of rejects, the pool could be the problem. Try dropping the “expiry” setting down to 10 or 15 and see if anything improves. Also, try some other pools.

If your reject/stale rate is low but pools are still showing your hashrate low then please post a screenshot of cgminer, if you could, after at least ~15-30minutes of mining – I’d be interested to see what it shows. I’m honestly not sure what the problem might be in that case, sorry. :(

Best of luck in getting the issue sorted!

You’re very welcome. :))

Apologies for the commands that did not work – I was unable to test them as I don’t have access to a setup with multiple GPUs like yours at them moment. I’m guessing maybe it doesn’t like the double "1"s in the “-g” command, maybe only one is necessary.
(EDIT: reviewed the readme file, it seems “-g 1” is correct, NOT “-g 1,1” … I’ve modified my previous post to reflect this, sorry about that!)

Your temperature management/clockspeed settings look good to me, but I’m not really an expert on that part of cgminer (I do all clockspeed and fan control settings with MSI Afterburner).

Glad to see things are now working more as expected. Best of luck in collecting coins! :)

For the most part, any guide pertaining to Litecoin should be useful for Feathercoin (AFAIK). Here’s a good guide that shows how to setup a Litecoin server for solo mining in Windows: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83371.0

You’ll probably have to change the name of the configuration file (litecoin.conf -> feathercoin.conf) and maybe a few other things, but otherwise it should be valid. The guide configures solo mining on a single machine. Since you have multiple rigs, you’ll need to make sure that they can all access the Feathercoin server. If they’re not all on a LAN, port forwarding may be necessary too. I was able to successfully follow that exact guide linked earlier and solo mine with multiple rigs by making only a few tweaks.

It seems you have quite a lot of hardware. Solo mining with 11+ 7950s should be workable with the current difficulty, I suppose. If I were in that situation, I’d still stick with a pool though, personally.

Reply back if you run into any major snags. Good luck! :)

anbo369’s advice is good and should be all you need to get started pool mining. I would recommend against solo mining with only two 7950s. Since most pools right now are running with little if any fees, I would pool mine instead. At this point, with the currently difficulty, assuming a hash rate of 1,200KH/s you can expect to only find 1 block (200FC) every 27.5 hours or so. Yes, you could get lucky and find five blocks your first day, but you could also mine three days and find nothing.

Of course, I always error on the side of caution. The choice is yours. :))

Keep in mind that it may take a short while before the pool starts to show something resembling your true hash rate (5-10 minutes). cgminer often defaults to a worksize of 64 which can also cause your hashrate to appear low on the serverside; increase your worksize to 256 using “–worksize 256”.

Try this configuration in a batch file:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer --scrypt -o http://fhc.ub3rl33t.com:9344 -u username.1 -p x --intensity 19,19 --shaders 1792,1792 --thread-concurrency 24000,24000 --worksize 256,256 -g 1 --lookup-gap 2,2 --expiry=15 --queue=0

The “setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100” should fix error 61. Intensity 19 and “-g 1” should get you up above 520KH/s per card, even with stock clockspeeds. The worksize setting will hopefully help fix your hash speed issue on the pool side. Finally, the expiry and queue settings can help reduce stales/rejected shares.

At 1MH/s, which you should be able to obtain easily, you would earn 146 coins/day before pool fees at the current difficulty of 27.5.

Please reply back and tell us if this worked out for you! :)