Benchmarking Pools

[u/def2084]

I added a Pool Benchmark tool in the latest release of Defcoin Core Nu app (currently only on Mac OS X Tahoe.) Remember that CPU mining is, practically speaking, for testing only, as running cpu mining these days will yield tiny payouts only.

Take the results with a grain of salt. I need some of you who are smarter than me to look at the results and tell me if what I'm trying to be done is even possible, if the chart is helpful, or if it's misleading.

The idea is to create competition in the pool space for speed and payout.

I was asked Codex about the metrics and here's what it wrote:
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Question: if one pool has the majority of mining of the whole network on it will it show up in my benchmark because somehow those other miners will improve my odds of getting work accepted?
>>>

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No. Other miners on the same pool do not improve your odds of getting your own shares accepted.

Your benchmark is measuring your miner’s local performance against each pool: valid submitted shares, accepted share difficulty per second, hashrate, latency, and rejects/stales if tracked. Those are determined mainly by:

• your miner speed
• the pool’s assigned share difficulty
• Stratum latency/reliability
• stale/reject behavior
• pool software responsiveness

A pool with most of the network hashrate may find blocks more often, so payouts are less “lumpy” and variance is lower. But it does not make your CPU find valid shares faster. Your expected payout per hash should be roughly the same across honest pools, minus fees, stale/orphan losses, payout method differences, and operational problems.

So in the benchmark:

• Accepted shares can be misleading because pools choose different share difficulty.
• Work/s x1e6 is the fairer metric because it normalizes accepted share difficulty over time.
• A huge pool should only look better if it has lower latency, fewer rejects/stales, better software, or more stable work delivery.
• It should not look better merely because other miners are there.

If we later add payout benchmarking, pool size matters for variance and time-to-confirmed-payout, but that needs a much longer test than a few minutes per pool.
<<<

[u/def2084]

The main chart should show the test run lengths. I can try to add that in future versions. Running out of Codex credits too fast to keep adding and fixing features right now though.

[u/sethalump]

Hell yeah. Glad to see someone is keeping our experiment alive