As everyone noticed, last week was quite a bumpy ride to put it politely. It started with an increasing number of dropped shares across all pools. As things progressed the situation worsened. Monitoring resource consumption indicated not only high load on all of the main servers 16 CPU cores but an insanely high memory consumption of the pool processes (up to 22 GB each). 

My initial analysis attributed this to an inefficiency in the pool code producing lots of garbage that need to be collected which means the pools became increasingly busy with themselves in addition to handling shares. Up to a point where the garbage collector halted all threads to keep up with the amount of garbage. This is when the pools started aggressively dropping shares deemed outdated when the pools finally resumed normal operation after sometimes 20 seconds long garbage collection passes. The analysis made sense even though the impact seemed to be way over the top for the amount of regular miners submitting shares. 

Since the servers are running AMD's latest Ryzen CPUs I also looked at the hardware side. Early batches of these CPUs had some issues that might be contributing to the situation. Because of this I've requested the hosting provider to migrate the server SSDs into newer servers equipped with updated batches of these CPUs. Unfortunately this did not have the desired effect. In fact things got even worse after this. Frantically searching for a solution I began to implement many performance improvements to the pool engine over the past week. The was the reason for the many many pool restarts you might have noticed when monitoring your rigs. As these code changes were implemented under stress, new bugs were introduced along the way. The issue with the massively rejected shares on the Ethereum Pool was part of the collateral damage caused by this. 

When the XMR pool finally found a new block in all of this chaos and suddenly the payout processing failed due to the system running out of file descriptors, I realized there must be something else. Pool servers are normally configured with extremely high file descriptor limits with ours being no exceptions at a limit of one million open file descriptors. Upon closer inspection I realized that someone managed to bog down the pools with connection attempts that flew under the radar and that did not get logged. We've been under DDos all the time without realizing it. Those attacks appear to have stopped by now. But is is clear that someone does not want this pool to succeed even though we are quite small. Unless those responsible wanted to ensure that it stays that way. They've partially succeeded as we've lost a lot of miners and I can't blame them for leaving.

- Oliver

While playing with the settings in the various miners there are options to connect to the pool in a secure manner.  Does this pool allow for secure connections?  If so, is this simply managed via settings in the miners or is there anything we need to know about the pool for this connection?  I ask because some miner fees are less if using a secure connection.

It would really help to see hash rate over last 24 hours, preferably broken down by worker.

Hi

Maybe I don't have enough patience, but my stats show that after about one week, I have reached 1.13B shares and still the XMR is 0. The hashrate varies between 1.5 to 2.5 KH/s.

I would like to know if I am in a good track or have to mine harder!

Coinfoundry's primary support site is moving away from this site to our brand new Discord Server. In the process we are also abandoning our less well known Slack site since Discord pretty much covers that just as well. 

Veteran members of this site or Slack please either use the same nick on Discord or PM me on Discord with your former nick in order to receive an appropriate discord user role (rank).

See you in discord. 

There's currently a problem with processing BTCP payouts. Working on a solution.

There is high orphaned rate for verge-blake2s, anything you can do to decrease the rate?

Regarding the privacy and security, there is a question in my mind and I haven't find a clear answer for that. While mining, my identity is hidden. However at the end of the day, I have to physically find someone (bank or something else) to change the XMR to Dollar. Isn't that? That means, my identity is finally revealed.

For example, I see that the is 2 XMR in my wallet. I know that there is a person that can give the equivalent Dollar. So, I have to ask about his wallet. Then I have to transfer 2 XMR to him and then physically go to his office and say, I am the person that transferred 2 XMR with the code XXXXXX. Do you remember? and he check his transactions and will give me the money.

That is the best case. If that is my first time, I may transfer 2 XMR to a good looking guy and after that he disappears without giving me the money.

Can someone shed a light on that? Maybe I don't know the exact process. Thank you

I have some questions since I am new to this field.

1- I don't see xmr.coinfoundry.org in the list of pools stated in http://moneropools.com/. What does that mean? Is that OK?

2- Some pools have lower fee/donations than coinfoundry which is 5% (or 2%???!!!). Also, some has higher or lower hash rates. How to decide which pool to select?

3- What is the Shares stat? I see 112M. Should it be higher or lower? Does that affects achievements?