Optimizing Plotters

Chia Plotting
1

This post pulls back the curtain a bit on all the knobs of plotters. Feedback is welcomed.

7 Likes
2

Very well done. This explains several things for me.

  1. If insufficient RAM is provided for the task it will default to QS(Quick Sync). I’d be curious to know what this does on Intel since it actually supports quick sync. I’m not sure how much effect this has, but on Ryzen I’m seeing about a 20% slow down for handling a bucket when it drops to QS. Looks like this does happen 17 times guaranteed, wonder if there might be an alternative for AMD?

  2. There is some amount of overhead, but I’m not sure how much yet. It seems like it’s proportional both to the amount of RAM used as well as the number of threads used and can be determined virtually at the start of a run so from a tuning perspective relatively easy to dial in and would appear to be stable after that.

Take-away from this start a run check the RAM: #.###GiB listed for the first bucket you see. Target 3.250 to prevent any forced drops to QS. 3.000 would cover you for about 80-90% , if you are hurting for RAM. (Assumed K32). It would seem like this would be something that could be put into the GUI as a checkbox for auto-optimize. Set # of threads, set RAM option to BareBones/Minimal/Normal/Performance ; targeting 1.5/2.25/3.00/3.25 GiB(Just placeholder numbers) return from bucket.

  1. I have taken your advice about copying from my NVME to an old SSD I’m not worried about trashing, because of its small size. I created a robocopy move bat file tied to task scheduler to run every 10 minutes transferring the plots to the final destination. Not sure if I have a better fast and dirty solution for Win10 available

Thanks for the guide. Quite well done. Correct me if I misunderstood anything.

P.S. is there any benefit to overloading RAM past the bare minimum for the bucket?

2 Likes
3

Thank you.

The QuickSync here…I’m not sure if it’s the Intel supported protocol either. I thought it was a name they picked.

Your take-away is spot on. And, there aren’t really that many benefits going past u_sort min anymore. There was previously. Windows is twitchy to where it places whatever RAM amount you configure into “stand by”. You can see this in resource monitor.

1 Like
4

Reading your post also made me realize that I should have posted my robocopy batch script so I did that. It just loops every 30 seconds upon start.

1 Like
5

Yeah please do post any robocopy scripts I’d be interested in seeing them!

7

Ah I should have been more clear. I put it in my blog post but here it is also:

@echo off
:loop
set "source=D:\plot"
set "destination=\\<Your 2nd machine>\<your plot folder>"
robocopy "%source%" "%destination%" /mov *.plot
timeout /t 30
goto loop
3 Likes
8

I’ve always wanted to find a good use case for bvckup2.com which looks like an excellent piece of software tailored for moving plots around :wink:

3 Likes
9

Have you found that your 1TB NVMe staging drive to be too small? Seems that would load up pretty quickly before it could get all the plots off, no? I was thinking of the same thing but was thinking a bit larger would be needed with the numbers you are giving.

10

2 plots are made every 40ish minutes before another set lands so robocopy has enough time to get them off. The “mov” switch deletes the file from the source once the copy is done.

3 Likes
11

Update! I called it QuickSync, but it’s actually QuickSort. I blame dealing with QuickSync in Intel processors on this.

12

Well, you can edit your old posts to fix it…

1 Like