Plotting stuck at 31% for over 14 hours

Chia Plotting
1

Hello,
I’m trying out plotting on an old Thinkpad X230 laptop (Core I5, 2.6GHz, 8GB RAM) I wasn’t using. I know it’s not ideal.
Took about 3 hours to get to 31% (phase 1 I think) but then has remained there for about 14 hours.

htop shows 100% CPU for a few seconds on alternate cores but never together. Laptop fan at idle and no heat from vent.

Running GUI on Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu 20.04) as I’m familiar with that. Used default settings for the first plot.

I thought this laptop was 4 core but apparently it’s 2-core though htop and task manager show 4. Maybe that’s 2 threads per core I don’t know. Anything I can do to diagnose this and maybe get it plotting, even if slowly?
Thanks for any help.

2

31% is when Phase 2 starts, during which the GUI doesn’t show much progress.
That said, 14 hours for phase 2 when phase 1 completes in 3 is very odd.

What does the log say?

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3

How many plots are you doing in parallel? Are your drives getting filled? Oftentimes it hangs like this because a drive is full, specifically the temp drive.

4

Thanks for replying both.

Lots in the log but all seem to be about node connections as far as I can tell.

Only 1 plot, my first. Both temp SSD and farm HD empty at the start. SSD is Samsung PRO 500GB that I had.

5

I meant the log for the plotting process (open the menu of your plot job in the list on the plot tab)

6

Those logs are for your daemons, not the plotting. GUI doesn’t have plotting logs as far as I know.

Also yes, 2 core, 2 threads per core.

Run this in terminal to get your CPU specs: cat /proc/cpuinfo

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7

Oh, sorry. End of log is this:

Starting phase 2/4: Backpropagation into tmp files... Wed May 5 20:38:59 2021
Backpropagation on table 7
scanned table 7
scanned time = 208.891 seconds. CPU  (43.840%) Wed May 5 20:42:29 2021
sorting table 7
8

Lot’s of CPU info there, I’m not on the same machine so can’t cut and paste but lists info for CPU 0 to 3.

9

No idea what it got stuck on, but it’s clearly not going anywhere. Just kill it (quit the GUI and kill anything that looks related to Chia, especially the plotting process that may still be eating CPU, in your favourite task manager) and remove the temporary files from your temporary directory.

Since you’re plotting on a laptop - any chance it went to sleep around that time? Plotting doesn’t like that.

10

Okay, will end it. I’ve disabled all sleep events, even on closing the lid. Unless there are any other suggestions I will look into leaning the command-line and try plotting without node connections, not sure correct term.

Thanks.

11

Had another attempt today, same result.
Could it be because:

  1. The drives are formatted as exfat
  2. I’m using Mint instead of Ubuntu
  3. I used the experimental installer instead of the command line installer
  4. I only have 8GB of RAM
  5. My CPU only has 2 cores

I’ve probably missed the boat on this anyway but bought 8TB drive for it so was hoping to give it a go.

Please let me know if you think there’s something I can try.

12

Yeah “stuck at 31%” is definitely emerging as a support theme in several topics…

13

You didn’t miss the boat :slight_smile: Keep plotting :slight_smile:

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14

Decided to try command line plotting and now it works. about 9.5 hours on my old laptop. I used the -e flag to disable bitfield plotting in case that was a problem, also created ext4 file system instead of exFAT on temp SSD.

It would be good if there was a test you could run that would go through whole process in a short time to see if any problems arise. Like creating a tiny but useless final plot.

It has a problem copying the plot from temp SSD to final drive but that’s a different problem for another thread.

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