The 'Plotman is awesome' thread

Chia Tools & Scripts
1

Started using Plotman last night. It takes some effort to get set up - but once it’s going it is awesome!

A few advantages of using it:

  1. You can set a limit of simultaneous plts per temp drive, so you’ll never overflow it and screw everything up(I found this hard to achieve from the GUI)
  2. You can set a limit of simultaneous plots per phase, so it will automatically make sure you’re not overdoing the CPU intensive stuff in Phase 1 (also not easy to achieve from the GUI)
  3. The plotting processes run separately to the GUI thread so if you inadvertently kill the GUI thread they’ll keep running (don’t ask me how I know this!)

I couldn’t find a thread on here about Plotman, so I thought I’d create one here.

It’s not that easy to setup and the documentation can definitely be improved, so perhaps we can share what we’ve learned so far.

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A few tips and tricks I have learned so far:

  1. Once you’ve edited your config file, you need to run plotman plot to get it started plotting (I am working on submitting a change to the doc to say this!)
  2. If you have a fast machine, the default settings are very conservative. I’m still fine tuning them but I’ve got an i9-9900 with 64GB RAM and needed to crank them up a lot
  3. If you get an error saying “file not found” when you first run it, you need to manually create the log folder that the config file points to
  4. I set my minimum time between plots to 1 minute, because I think this constraint is arbitary and unnecessary when you get the other paramaters right (I have a fast CPU and 64GB of RAM with only a 2TB and 1TB SSD, so I’m limited by SSD space more than anything. I want to use as much of the SSD capacity as possible)
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Are you referring to this?

Helpful to link it, if we’re gonna talk about it, right? :wink: I went ahead and edited your post to add the link, I hope that’s OK!

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4

This is great!

I was planning on starting to create just this type of thing. I want a more passive setup where I simply monitor it (or even just be notified for issues) rather than babysitting all my plot jobs.

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I need to make some statistics - want to know how many plots per day I am making.
Any command / shell script for that?

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Great tool, I’m using it since a week.

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Example

#!/bin/bash
  
#datecmd=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d')
echo "Enter Date YYYY-MM-DD [ENTER]:"

read date

echo "Enter Plot Dir [ENTER]:"

read dir

pcount=$(ls $dir |grep $date | wc -l)
echo "We plotted $pcount plots on $date"
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8

Can you use this on Windows 10? I didn’t see an explanation about Windows on GitHub

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Plotman is very new and there’s a bunch of work that needs to be done on it. We know it works on Linux. Windows…maybe. There’s a mention of it maybe working on the Plotman Github page, but you’re own your own basically.

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