Based on my own farm size (~350TB) I came to the conclusion that it is no longer worth pooling and I decided to switch to solo farming. I’m basing this on my farmer’s performance over the last 6 weeks during which time I see a loss of 56% in profit which I could have made by farming solo. Anyone else made the same discovery or has my farmer been just super lucky over the last few weeks?
Another way to look at it, if you’ve been lucky , you could well be due a dry spell to compensate, so self pooling now wouldn’t be my choice, but up to you.
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While I was monitoring my performance throughout March I though it may have been a dry spell and I’m now randomly hitting multiple blocks in a row but I’m starting to see a pattern and my farmer is hitting blocks much more often then the advertised time to win in chia CLI. Will try solo for few weeks just to test my theory 
I just switched to solo. I’d have 40% more XCH (on paper at least) if I’d been solo this whole time. I understand that past performance is not indicative of future results but I’m going to give it a shot.
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Solo all the way. No point in pool farming unless you have shitty hardware or super small farm and would take forever to win a block. Everything below 3 months win chance, I recommend to solo farm.
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I also wrote in another post that I hit several blocks recently and have no explanation for that (other than the current dust storm may have caused that - some nodes got out of sync).
Although, I was looking at XCHcentral pool reporting page and was quite surprised with their findings. They only monitor 10 pools, but the spread is actually bigger than 10%. In other discussions, folks tend to focus on pool fees, but seeing a pool that is constantly 10% behind, basically dwarfs that.
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I have been asking myself the same question lately, netspace has dropped quite a bit since it’s peak.
On the one hand there is the fact that I went almost 5 months without winning a single block. If I wasn’t in a pool this would have driven me mad and going through logs like a crazy person.
On the other hand, over the last 6 months that I have been with my current pool, I won 6 blocks, so that would have been 12 XCH. While total payout from the pool has been 9,2 XCH
Total blocks won since re-plot for pools is 7, or 14 XCH which is about spot on for my 224 TiB farm over 8 months.
Agree btw with @Jacek that monitoring pool performance is much more an issue than any pool fees.
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I’ve contemplated this myself, currently at about 350tb growing towards 450tb, but then I’ve also wondered why there are so many large farms in the pools with multiple Pib’s.
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Really does not matter, solo or pool, it will take years just to recover the huge investment in drives alone. And that is if proof of space even survives and gets adopted by someone or something credible.
If I went solo, I should have 18 chia but now I have 11.5. So did I do wrong?
Do you have strong enough stomach to potentially wait 6 months for your next win?
I have been in chia since ten months. My longest block win is 40 days, shortest is 3 days!!! Total 9 win! If I went solo from the beginning, now I should have 18 chias (but only have 11 xch). So do I need a strong stomach? I think this is mainly related to: A high speed internet, high speed cpu, good reach times under 5 sec. and a system without any problem.
Now I think that we the pool lowers are paying for the chia runners that have old and slow computers and hard drives. Where did my 18 - 11= 7 xch go??? To that pool accounts not winning any block for months!!!
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I guess is actually really hard to know how a pool performs as a whole.
Their reported netspace is based on partials submitted, so bad farmers will also lower the pools reported netspace.
To really see a pool performance you would need to know the “real” total space of all the farmers.
If you go by just your own space and payout received vs blocks won, there is the issue of luck that skewes the results.
In any case, changing pools or changing from solo to pool or back is easy.
I think the only reason most of us dont is we want to keep our slot from the beginning where we got perks like lower fees.
But honestly 1% is so little compared to the (possible) differences in performace that it really doesnt matter.
One other think that is really good though about being in a pool is that you get message as soon as something is wrong.
I would need to have some alternative for that if I want to go solo.
If i dont get notification, my farm could easily be offline for a week or more before i find out
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Ultimately its simply an odds game
There are some advantages of pooling - I rejoin every 4-6 weeks if I haven’t hit a block just to ensure my partials are valid & farm working as it should. I still have other monitoring software but its additional reassurance.
450TB
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This is a really good question. The way pools operate is to check who participate and how. If a farm is not up to speed, it is marked with stale points, i.e., those don’t count for those rewards. So, we really should not have such imbalances.
As I mentioned in some other place, I was looking at XCHcentral pool monitoring page, and the spread is up to ~12%. So, that would be another question to ask, why there are such big disparities between those pools (potentially similar to what you listed for those other farmers). Those disparities dwarf those pool fees. (By the way, it looks like a lot of smaller pools are closing.) Also, with XCH price so low, and everyone talking about having lambos in a few months, those fees we pay right now, are peanuts comparing to how high XCH will be then. Also, if all goes South, it really doesn’t matter what fees we had.
I guess, the best statistic is to give the ratio of total XCH (wallet) to Block Rewards (Farm page). In my case that is 5.15. For you that would be 11XCH Total / 9 * 0.25XCH Block Rewards - 4.89. So, either you are really lucky, or your pool is even worse than mine (or I got it screwed up). If all is balanced, it should be 8. The lower the number (lower than 8), the luckier such farm is, or pool is doing something really not right.
Maybe we should start another thread and ask to share those numbers.
Here are results from that XCHcentral page with data captured few minutes ago.
| 0.002724 | 0.002672 | 0.002637 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12.78% | 8.79% | 12.25% | ||||||||
| 30 days | perf | diff | 60 days | perf | diff | 90 days | perf | diff | ||
| FoxyPool.io | 0.002724 | 100.00% | 0.00% | 0.002659 | 99.51% | 0.49% | 0.002546 | 96.55% | 3.45% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| PoolChia | 0.002713 | 99.60% | 0.40% | 0.002636 | 98.65% | 1.35% | 0.002637 | 100.00% | 0.00% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| XCHPool | 0.002685 | 98.57% | 1.43% | 0.002672 | 100.00% | 0.00% | 0.002545 | 96.51% | 3.49% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| Flexpool.io | 0.00268 | 98.38% | 1.62% | 0.002584 | 96.71% | 3.29% | 0.002489 | 94.39% | 5.61% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| Sweetchia | 0.002638 | 96.84% | 3.16% | 0.002602 | 97.38% | 2.62% | 0.002486 | 94.27% | 5.73% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| Space Pool | 0.002608 | 95.74% | 4.26% | 0.002525 | 94.50% | 5.50% | 0.002461 | 93.33% | 6.67% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| Chiahub.io | 0.002521 | 92.55% | 7.45% | 0.002564 | 95.96% | 4.04% | 0.002429 | 92.11% | 7.89% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| SpaceFarmers.io | 0.002487 | 91.30% | 8.70% | 0.002494 | 93.34% | 6.66% | 0.002314 | 87.75% | 12.25% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
| Chiabatta.xyz | 0.002376 | 87.22% | 12.78% | 0.002437 | 91.21% | 8.79% | 0.002414 | 91.54% | 8.46% | 4/12/2022 23:32 |
Maybe not. If counted properly that should exclude stale / bad points (there was some time ago some post by Chia how to properly calculate that). If you use the ratio I mentioned, that assumes that rewards are split just among those that really contributed in a given block, and has nothing to do with either net space or time. Although, we could argue that some farms may be more luckier on some blocks, and less on others. Still, the whole point is the long term, as such the ratio I mentioned should be closer to 8, the more XCH you have.
ChiaDog is good for that. It just parses log files, so you can just expose your log folder, and have it run on a different box, so no access to your farming node is needed. It is a github project, so not sure how scrutinized. I went though few pages (modified some to get different output), but really didn’t check everything. The project was most likely abandoned, so no risk of future changes that could include malware.
Yeah, it is easy, but it is not that helpful (one may be lucky before, but not right now, …). On the other hand, maybe we can exchange that ratio, or collect it somewhere, so we will have a better data to look at.
Actually I think i just figured a great solution to this. I have 111 plots that are in a different NFT, If I keep those in pool where they are now, I will still get notified when my farmer goes offline and I can still get pretty decent info from their dash on my farmers performance. Kinda cheating but well 
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As a counter to those who are better off being solo I submit an anecdote of an opposite situation. I admin two separate farms for two separate groups of people.
The smaller one is around 260TiB and has won a block a grand total of… 1 time. One time which was quite recent. I checked and rechecked the logs and response times and everything checks out. It did have some intermittent down time until about 2 months ago but still highly against the odds. In total it has farmed about 10XCH.
The bigger one is 570TiB and counting. It has won a total of around 10 blocks with 3 being before pooling. It has an estimated time to win of about 12 days and we are currently on day 60 since last win. Total farmed is about 26XCH.
What i’m saying is that even with a time to win of 12 days I would never switch to solo farming. That small fee is worth the hastle of worrying between block wins
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This is a very good conversation and all points are valid. Pool fees are mostly insignificant and as difficulty and netspace are dropping I’m seeing more and more plots getting through the filter and being evaluated for each challenge. This is why I decided to go solo and the fact that my farm is rock solid by this point and I can keep a close eye on it. The loss of >50% potential profit is what pushed me to make a change and I understand that even if I make these XCHs farming solo it will not pay for the HW, but at this point I think most of us have no choice but to farm & hold until price goes up (cross fingers) 
That is a good poor man monitoring solution LOL
I dont think netspace has anything at all to do with that.
It’s a fixed amount, pretty sure your just seeing variation.
I think the difficulty is affecting it which has been going down with the netspace.