Everyone knows that the level of information provided by the Chia software is terribly limited. But I just discovered a whole other level. I have been running a single full node for a couple weeks. It has been farming/harvesting two network drives. I have been religiously monitoring the search times which look like this in the logs.
2021-05-21T17:23:13.486 harvester chia.harvester.harvester: INFO 0 plots were eligible for farming 5ebc1fb672... Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.01738 s. Total 157 plots
This is what most people point out when they say that the GUI doesn’t tell you when you are losing out. Because if this time goes over 30 seconds, that search is no good. You only have 30 seconds to respond.
So, I have watched that like a hawk. Meanwhile, chiadog has been entering the following in the logs (the chiadog logs).
[2021-05-21 08:41:48] [ INFO] --- Last farming event was 59 seconds ago. This is unusual. (time_since_last_farm_event.py:47)
It was happening a couple times an hour. I looked it up when I first saw them and the documentation said that it wasn’t an error, just a warning of something that was not normal. So, I just ignored them. But yesterday, I split my harvesters so that each NAS has it’s own local harvester. Guess what, those messages went away. I have not had a single “Last farming event” since I split them. So, that means that my single node farmer was lagging and missing searches entirely. And nothing in the GUI said anything. Nothing in the debug log said anything. So, anyone out there that thinks they are farming along just fine, you better dig deep. There is a chance you are missing your chances altogether and the system just isn’t smart enough to tell you.
But, it still doesn’t tell you when the system entirely missed a search. Like something on your network or server performance caused it to skip a minutes worth of searches. That is what I am pointing out here. My system was saying it hadn’t participated in a farming event for an entire minute. That is not supposed to happen. You should get at least one every 5 - 20 seconds. But my system was not and the GUI, or the debug log said nothing about it.
I had this and lost about 2 weeks of mining rewards. Now, I do not let my farmer or harvesters grown beyond 70-80TiB. It’s cheap to get a rpi harvester.
I have an RPi4 (8GB) with NVMe via USB3 and it runs a full node without issue since v1.1.6.
I agree with @coinplex. I started trying to configure v1.1.5 and it was basically unusable. As soon as I installed v1.1.6 it started syncing right away. (Then I learned about copying the db(s) from my previous full node and the Pi was fully synced in minutes.
I just checked by debug log. No errors and only one warning for Cannot write to closing transport 68.201.134.119…meh
Also 99.9% of my plot check times are under 1 second. Once in awhile I’ll see 1-2 second checks but it’s rare as of the last few days.
I do have the Pi overclocked to 2.0GHz, but I might try and turn that down and see if there are any issues with farming.
I was suspecting something like this going round on my setup. I usually get challenges every few seconds. But there are times i see them less frequently. So you basically just added local harvester to get around this?
I also sawy that 4 days laters you got some rewards. Seems to be some secret sauce to me you found here