Chia Plotting too slow - R9 3950x

Chia Plotting
1

Hello everyone. I’m in need of a huge help! About a week ago I got a fresh, new setup just for chia. The configuration is Ryzen 9 3950x, 4x 32GB 3200MHz ram, Asus rog strix b550-f motherboard, NZXT Kraken X63 280mm, 2x Sata SSD Samsung 870 QVO 4TB (right now in RAID 0) and 5 more chassis fans. I tried all different plotting settings, from single plotting, up to 16 parallel plots. On a single plot I get about 5 hours plotting time, but when I try to plot in parallel, right now 10 parallel plots (8000MiB, 32 threads each), I get 10 hours for one plot with a delay time of 240 min (1+2 phase). As I can notice, the SSDs are working almost all the time at 100%, but with average of about 120mbps and maximum of around 480 mbps. The ram is max used 60% and the CPU average is around 60%. I’m plotting in GUI, because I don’t yet understand the CLI completely. This is according to HWinfo which is running all the time…

Can someone, PLEASE, give me some kind of advice, how to improve the plotting speed, as I thing I should be making at least 10-15 plots a day…I guess the bottleneck is in the SSDs, but they are pretty good too and also in raid 0.

I use external 4TB HDDs on usb 3.0 for final destination, the SSDs are temporary space.
I have about 5TiB plots right now, after 6 days plotting, with some pauses for configuration change.
Also, I have a problem with the GUI. Yesterday I restarted the PC, so I had to sync again and is still not synced (since yesterday). When I try to reload it for the GUI menu. it stuck to connecting to wallet.

PLEASE HELP! :sob: :sob: :sob:

2

That’s too much. Try 3600MiB and 4 threads.

1 Like
3

My first guess is your SSD’s are the bottleneck. The IO performance you report for them seem in line with reviews and benchmarks. Both phase 1 and phase 3 will hammer your storage pretty hard. I think you should have no more than 2, maybe 3 plots going per sata SSD.

Remove the raid 0, and try 2x3 plots, each set hitting a different SSD, give thenm 4 treads each, and 6780 MiB om memory. Stagger in each set by your predicted phase 1 speed.

For future improvements either get more SATA SSD’s or move to PCIe M.2 drives

4

As fior the GUI stuck in connecting to wallet, shut it down, remove the incomplete or stuck plot files from your temp drive, and remove the the associated logs from your mainnet\plotter directory. Now the GUI should connect again (it might take a few minutes)

5

I just removed the raid, put my m.2 nvme back in (it’s just 512GB), which I had at first for Windows, but removed when I put the SSDs in raid. I used the setup you told me, 6780 MiB and 4 threads. 4 parallel plots, per SSD, with different queue name so both SSDs can work parallel. So far it’s looking good, we’ll see in a few hours. Thank you all for the help. I wish I had my hands on at least 2 nvmes, of at least 2 TB, but in my country it’s hard to find them.