Slow Response Time / Dedicate the issue

Hello guys,
Since about 10 Days i have some issues with my response times beeing slow.

My average response time is about 0.63 seconds which is fine for me, but my longest response took about 5 seconds.
I think it could be a failing HDD, what do you guys think?
Not every challenge has bad response times, maybe every 5 minutes ONE challenge response time go up to 5 seconds, so thats why i think its a failing HDD.

- Im farming on a Full Node Mini PC which shouldnt be the problem.
- Network Connection is stable
- Port 8444 is open and i have 80 Connections to the Network
- I have 17 HDDā€™s connected, each in a 4 bay HDD Case, each Case connected via USB 3.0 to a USB 3.2 HUB which is connected to the Mini PC
- I have checked the HDD Temperatures which are all round 40Ā° but one HDD has around 47Ā° which in my opinion may could be the problem for the bad response times??

I further have some questions in general:

- If the problem really is my HDD, and lets say 1 Plot from my ā€œbadā€ HDD passes a Filter and the response time is lets say 35secs, so it cant win the challenge, are my other Plots from my other HDDā€™s still eligable to win the challenge, and so the block? Or do i dont even have a chance of win the block when the response time from the one failing HDD takes too long??
- Is it more likely possible to win a block with 1 sec response time than another person with a response time of 5-10seconds? Or does it just dont matter as long as it stays under 30 seconds??
- Is there a way to dedicate why my response times are bad? Can i check somewhere in the logfile which Plot or which Disc causes my response time to be that bad?

Maybe someone had the same issue and can help me to fix it, im afraid that i dont have a chance to win a block, because im farming +200TiB for 2 months and didnt win anythingā€¦

Greetings and thanks to everyone!!!

-XCHeisenberg

Your HDDs in USB arrays setup is similar to mine with one exception: USB 3.0 SS.

You can significantly reduce your response times by using USB 3.0 SS throughout. I use all 3.0 SS ports and 3.0 SS powered hubs. 3.0 SS is five times faster than normal 3.0. My avg response time is under .15 seconds with longest response always under 2 seconds.

I donā€™t think your problem is your slightly high temp HDD or any HDD. If an HDD was the culprit I suspect you would have larger problems than response times. I think your occasional long response is more likely due to checking multiple plots on the same drive while using regular USB.

Most newer arrays are 3.0 SS. Make sure yours are SS before you bother to upgrade anything else. If one component is not SS then the rest being upgraded is not helpful.

I think my USB Hub supports USB 3.0 SS but my Mini-PC donā€™t support the SS I guessā€¦

USB 3.2 Gen 1 (old USB 3.0) is 5gpbs.
USB 3.2 Gen 2 (old USB 3.1) is 10gps
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 is 20gpbs.

USB 3.0 SS was literally just a way of differentiating USB3 from USB2. It was 5gpbs.

Very few external spinning disks using anything but USB 3.2 Gen 1.

But 5gb/s should be more than fine for farming, right?

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Make sure your HDDs are not spinning down. If they have to wake up, it takes a few seconds more, and thatā€™s where the 5 seconds delay youā€™re seeing comes from (probably).

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How can i make sure they are not spinning down?
And how can i prevent it?

Good point actually!

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You turn sleep mode off in your BIOS for both USB and your HDDs. Have USBs and HDDs on full time.

This fix is at least as important as the USB SS, especially for the longest response times.

Yeah ā€¦ there was never a good standard naming system for the USB 3 variants. USB 3.0 is twice as fast as USB 2.0, and USB 3.0 SS is five times faster than USB 3.0 and ten times faster than USB 2.0. 5 GB/s is what you are looking for in the specifications to be sure. If you just have one component that is not 5 GB/s then I would suggest upgrading it after turning off sleep modes in your BIOS, lolz! :smiley:

I just created a cron job to echo nonsense to the usb hdd mount every few minutes. Seems to be working for me. You on Windows or Linux base?

Im on Windows but I somehow think my hddā€˜s are not sleepingā€¦ would be cool if there would be a tool to find out if they are spinning down or notā€¦ but somehow I think they are always awake

Sleep mode is generally the BIOS default for USB and HDD and cannot be accessed from the OS. They both are usually set to sleep at 30 minutes or less.

Re-boot into your BIOS to check and change.

Every word here is wrong.

USB 3 is 10x faster than USB2 (and change). USB2 = 480mpbs top speed, USB3 is 5gpbs top speed. USB 3 SuperSpeed IS USB 3.0. There is no difference.

As for making external HDDs not to go sleep there are two Power Plan settings that control this, one is for Hard Drive sleep settings (defaults to 20 minutes) and one is USB power savings which is set to moderate by default if i recall. There are no BIOS settings to change.

You should do some research before commenting.

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I already did that set that energy power saving options.
As already said above, I donā€™t think my Hard Drives go to sleep, I just think there still might be a HDD in my Setup that is not 100% healthy that causes the bad look up times sometimesā€¦
Usually I have around .6s lookup time but then it goes up to 3s for one challenge, next one is around .6s againā€¦

I just reread your post, i was mostly trying to correct the weirdly bad USB advice.

Thatā€™s a lot of devices connected over USB3. Are you using Linux? Do you see any xHCI errors? Also, what CPU and how much RAM do you have?

I have a Mini PC with a Intel Celeron J4125 and 8GB of RAM.
System is stable at this point.
I just hope my Mini PC can handle this much data over USB3.0, but I think it should because most of my lookup times are under 1s, even under .5s.
Just sometimes there is one block challenge with over 4s.
I wonder, if my response time is letā€™s say 4 seconds, is this the response time of my whole system or just that one particular HDD/Plot?
Thatā€™s what I wonder most aboutā€¦
But as described above, I think it might be a HDD Which is not 100% healthy, because it just happens sometimes and not all the time :+1:t2:

Run a disk selftest in linux : smartctl -t long /dev/sdX
(You might need to install smartmontools from source first.) You can also look for remapped sectors in the output of smartctl -a /dev/sdX

its not about data, there are device connection limits over xhci (13 i think?) and you might have devices downgrading to eHCI. Also, that Atom based Celeron might be doing something and get stuck when a lookup needs to happen, its not very fast if a bunch of stuff is going on at once.

Im working and farming on a windows machineā€¦

I just bought that mini pc with that processor for energy effiency, it should be way enough for farming i guessā€¦ some guys farming on a raspberry piā€¦