A lot of people here are trying to piece together a plotting rig to pump out as many plots as they can per day. And I get that and went through the same thing, let me walk you through what I believe will be good hardware choices to get 40 to 50 plots out of a single machine!
These videos are also linked to an info article here: Chia farming info post - Intermittent Technology
Discussions and/or questions about the video and it’s content are very welcome here! Let me know what you think!
This is top notch content, thanks for sharing!
I do have some concerns about 32GB being enough for 12 plots in parallel though, I had one of my two 32GB DIMMs fail recently and tried to keep going on the other one until I could get a replacement.
I was monitoring memory usage all throughout the day, and I never saw it peak above 25GB total usage so I also thought it would be fine. Turns out it wasn’t fine though, and I got completely stuck overnight running 8GB deep into swap.
Not sure what happened there, but it looks to me like plotting somehow uses significantly more memory than the system reports. Maybe there are really high peaks that are too brief to show up on htop? And would disabling swap have prevented this? I’m not sure it would have made a difference since the OS probably only swaps if it’s forced to do so.
Interesting, in theory staggering should prevent from too many plots running in the “memory hog” phase together and such 32GB should do fine up to 12 plots. I haven’t had any issues myself, memory generally is at 75% of max.
I’m also running Ubuntu Server so cli only and it’s own memory usage is very little. But since you mentioned “htop” you have to be running Linux too.
Memory is one of the least interesting and useful things for Chia plotting. It borderline doesn’t matter. In the earlier days you could get a marginal boost from adding memory, but not any more since they’ve optimized the plotter.