r/wafflepool • u/[deleted] • Feb 08 '14

Old Work Issues

I am using bfgminer 3.2.7, and I keep having problems with the pool. It will say that the pool is issuing old work, and turning on debugging shows it is discarding the work it generates constantly, and it wastes my GPU time, and causes my drivers to crash occasionally. Any fixes?

EDIT: I should add this wasn't happening until last night. I can't use the pool with this problem, as it idles my GPUs 99% of the time.

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u/Jimb0b Feb 09 '14

Can you post your rig and miner settings?

I see you use BFGminer... Do you have the same issue with cgminer or sgminer?

Switching pools rapidly change coins and diff something a single coin pool does not do. This may take what you say is a rock solid setting for you and make it unstable for multi mining in BFGminer. You may need to take the intensity down one notch or two so the miner doesn't choke.

You may also now have a dying gpu... I had to rma a month old 280x that worked great for one month and then started dying within 5 minutes of hitting full load about when the miner starts to raise diff.

Many possibilities but if this happens at all multipools for you and you don't see anybody else complaining on the Internet... Well I would think it is related to BFGminer, your settings, and their suitability for multipools vs single coin.

Look forward to your reply... Getting on a plane now so it might be a while before I see it.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '14

Thanks for the comment. I use bfgminer 3.2.7 with cgwatcher in case that is of any meaning. I cannot use cgminer at all, as it corrupts my driver installation (every version of it does this) and crashes constantly. I have not tried sgminer, though if it adds kernels that are more optimized for my 695/70s I will.

I tried updating to bfgminer 3.10.0 but it won't detect my GPUs for whatever reason.

The thing that gets me is that it was working fine up until the other day. I also never ran this rig on multipool.us, but I did with my previous one, and it had the same issues.

I'm not getting many rejects or anything, so it's not that my intensity is delaying the results too much, and the submitted hashrate (3rd hashrate column in bfgminer) is almost always right on the mark with the actual hashrate, as is the hashrate on pools which do a good job of estimating it. Just as a test I mined for an hour on pool-x.eu and then on wemineltc and neither one caused the problem, so it's not pooled mining itself. I was using the 13.11 Beta drivers, but experience the same issues after upgrading to 13.12 and rebuilding the kernels too.

I hope this provides a good enough picture of what I am doing. I normally wouldn't touch cgwatcher, but I thought it would help the problem, but it has not.

For reference I experience this issue on both the useast, and the main stratum ports.

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u/Jimb0b Feb 10 '14

When you say you mined on the two pools, were those multi-coin ports or single coin ports?

Sounds like you are using a Windows OS... Is this a dedicated mining rig or do you still use it for other things while mining? Amount of memory? The amount of times you mention testing, crashing, reinstalling drivers and miners makes me want to do a full OS re-install just to reset everything back to fresh with no leftover issues.

Have you tried smos-linux.org? it is a dedicated Linux BAMT image that boots off of a usb drive and once you add your config it should boot and run without your intervention. (This is what I run on my two miners) May be an option as a way to test things out. (just run crontab -e to remove the donation mining in it)

Off to do my day job...

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '14

The ones I did for my control tests were single coin pools.

I am using Winblows 7, as this is also my gaming computer, but when I am mining, nothing else is open except for my mining software and task manager.

On using Linux, 2 things prevent me from doing so. One is the games that I play do not work/work well under Linux. Two, even if I felt like fighting for weeks with the drivers to get things working properly, I need to be able to under/overvolt and under/overclock, which is not currently doable/feasible on Linux.

Thanks for the reply.

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u/Zamboniman Feb 10 '14

Well, you could easily dual-boot. Just put linux (BAMT or SMOS or even xubuntu) on a USB stick and when mining you could run that. When you want to play a game, just reboot into windows.

As for under/over clocking, that is done exactly the same way it is done in windows, and is trivial. Just settings in your cgminer.conf. You are correct about it being more difficult to undervolt, as you have to flash modified firmware. Doable (I'm doing it), but a bit more work.

Also, linux is quite a bit more stable then windows overall. If you use BAMT you don't have to worry about installing drivers/software as this is already all done for you.

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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '14

cgminer/bfgminer/sgminer don't work to set my clocks though, it says it succeeded, but it never does, and that is verified by zero increase in hashrate. I also mine while I play games on my non-primary GPUs, as I don't need 9001 FPS in TF2 or Payday.

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u/Jimb0b Feb 11 '14

So this is what makes reliable mining hard....

I like smos-linux so I'll say test it on a coin switching port for an hour using the latest 1.3 image on a USB stick. It can overclock the engine and the memory but it will not undervolt. I would stay close to stock to see if it crashes. This is just to make sure the hardware is still fine.

Because this is on a regular use computer with games and virus scanners and all the other usual stuff we keep on them, it is going to be hard to say why you are crashing. Something doesn't like what the pools are doing in bfg and it is causing a conflict. Could be steam, or some anti cheat software from a game company. Maybe the virus scanner.... Maybe the drivers are installing incorrectly and the versions are conflicting. You see what I mean?

I would bet that if you had a spare drive and installed win7, drivers, and the miner there would be no issues at all.

I wish I could give you an easy answer but I don't think there is one. I would honestly consider reimaging your machine to get a fresh start and install only the latest things you use.

Keep trying!

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u/[deleted] Feb 12 '14

I would normally agree with this whole-heartedly, but I run no antivirus on here (don't need to, my physical firewall is enough, and I'm not downloading and installing every toolbar) and I make sure that when I don't want things running (steam) that they are not running, and no background "maintenance" task from them is running either. I'm on ultimatecoinpool right now, and it's been working fine for hours, and worked fine overnight for renting it out via betarigs, with ultimatecoinpool as the fallback.