Every computer I start plotting on takes more than 72 hours to finish?

Can anyone give me a reason to continue this so far fruitless and frustrating endeavor?

I am a computer geek and have been doing plotting/farming sync activities since SETI @ Home
started. So I know what I am doing.

So far I have tried 5 different computers, and none of them work for Chia. Three HP i5 laptops (4 years old) (4 or 8 GB RAM), 256 GB SSD internal for boot, 512 GB SSD external for plotting, and 2 TB external HD for farming. All three plot to about 11% and then sit there and never change, been sitting for up to 4 days, at least 3 times each.

Fourth i5 laptop same specs as above but newer HP (2 years old) , has completed plotting, then moved files to farming drive, and now sits at Syncing 129824/259946 forever. Never completes sync. Have rebooted, have reinstalled Chia, with the newest version today, no change.

Fifth computer is a Xeon E31240, with 16 GB RAM, all internal drives. 256 GB SSD boot, 512 GB SSD plotting, and 4 TB HD for farming. So far it has been running for over 72 hours and has made it to 56%, and has now sat at 56% for 14 hours.

What am I missing, am I doing something wrong? Or is Chia still just such a immature technology that it is a complete crap shoot everytime?

Thanks
Shawn

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This question can’t be answered unless you are specific about what you are doing.
OS/plotting tool/chia version/plotting settings/etc.

In any case the sync is pretty CPU intensive, even on new computer, If you also try to plot at the same time maybe a bit much on old laptop. If you complete sync on one computer, you can just copy the DB files over to the next one.
.chia/mainnet//DB

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To install the chia-blockchain, follow the instructions according to your operating system. After installing, follow the remaining instructions in the Quick Start Guide to run the software. You should read the release notes and the wiki/repository FAQ.

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The key thing is to have:

  • a reasonably fast CPU with a few cores
  • fast plotting disks (SSD, NVME)

The CPUs referenced here seem plenty new enough, so if it’s taking that long to create a single plot I’d suspect disk, somehow? It is odd, you say they are SSDs and that should be enough. Do you have anti-virus or any other software installed that would interfere with disk writes?

I would say change the log level to info and dig into the logs. Definitely seems odd. I assume you’re trying to do one at a time just to test?

Finally some success.

I got one plot finished on my good laptop (HP i5, 8 GB RAM, 512GB NVME for Plotting and 1.8 TB HD for farming), then transferred the plot to my Xeon rig. I also got a plot finished on the Xeon itself. So it is farming 2 plots at the moment and creating a third.

The GUI tells me that it is farming, but it also tells me no blocks farmed yet. So how long does it usually take until you can actually see that you are farming XCH?

Also I am trying to create another plot on the laptop, but it has been sitting at Not Synched for about 2 hours now, it does show as connected, but will not synch.

Thanks

Don’t think that you’ll get a plot farmed any particular time period. I’ve nearly farmed 250 plots, none farmed. It’s a lottery, just try to be ‘lucky’, one day (year?) & u might be.

Try to do this to speed up your sync.

The goal should be higher no. of plots per day even with lower settings instead of fastest possible plot.

“It’s a lottery”. I am confused. I was under the impression that farming Chia is similar to mining Ethereum or other altcoins.

I thought that the work you do farming/mining builds up your rewards.

Is this the case or is it truly just a lottery where you “might” get lucky?

Noted, thank you.

I appreciate the suggestion.

My understanding is: each plot is a lottery ticket. Each regular ‘lottery’ 1/512 plots (of everyone) is chosen to participate. One winner of those who participate gets 2 XCH. Someone correct me if incorrect. Your plots last years if you keep them online to participate in many, many ‘lotteries’.

Mining any blockchain, Ethereum included, is a lottery. Every so often, someone randomly passes the condition to mine a block and the chance that it’s you is more or less your share of the resources.

The reason you get consistent returns when mining other cryptocurrencies even with a very low share is that you’re most likely doing pooled mining, where many miners join together and split the winnings amongst each other whenever one of them mines a block, which isn’t officially / safely available in Chia yet.

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As I explained in that post, downloading a blockchain snapshot will not help you go from “not synced” to “synced”, only from “syncing X/Y” to “synced” without waiting for hours as the numbers go up.

Thats what I said as well, it will speed up the sync! :slight_smile: