Hi,
This is how my full node looks like, I rarely see the “time created” of the different blocks (even after clicking the hash)
Is this OK?
Could it indicated network issues?
I’m asking as in Spare & Flax forks I ~ 4 times the estimated time to win with zero rewards.
My vdf times are reasonable (1.75 secs) and the network is the next issue I suspect.
Thanks 
If your is not ok, mine has never been ok as well. I have always wondered about the lack of time stamps, perhaps someone knows the underlying reason(s).
Of course, as I am writing this, I now get 4 time stamps in a row (followed by none again).
Has anyone found a solution for this problem? I should have been having 7-9 chia per month, but past 4 months I have had maybe 2 per month and 2 months nothing. I don’t believe it’s bad luck anymore. I believe I have missed at least 20xch in these months. Farmer is not sustainable like this
Just wait, THA EXPERT should appear soon, he will explain to you that this is just a variance 
My suggestion is it started to happening since 1.6.* somewhen.
Version 1.5.1 was my favorite one.
Are you farming solo?
how much netspace do you have?
Also it seems for me at least on my paranoid taste, there is something wrong with FULL_NODE part exactly especially for SOLO farmers.
Solo and I have over 0,5PB so I should definately not have month and two month dry periods in a row for 4 months…
Have you ever joined any pool at past?
I have been solo since Chia mainnet launched in 2021, I have had periods of ups and downs with winning blocks, currently on the upside of that, this is natural, you can take the code and do the math yourself to see there will be a natural variance from time to time, THATS A GOOD THING believe it or not, thats also why the official pooling protocol with PlotNFTs is so popular among users, because that smooths out rewards and puts people at ease, plus they can switch pools or go back to solo anytime.
One potential issue is people who stay on older versions of the software may in fact have genuine issues because there are soft forks that will continue to happen over time which may leave them behind in some ways, so its best to stay updated for those as well as security updates. While nothing is wrong in the original posters screen shots, staying on “this old version worked for me so why upgrade” can be a very bad habit to get into, there was a security update and soft fork recently, stay updated.
to answer both of you at once, I believe the simple answer is the timestamped blocks are those with transactions, as not all blocks contain transactions so they can bury the transaction blocks for quicker settlement of the chain. This is also why when you create a block you get rewarded a few blocks later, in one of those transaction blocks.
So this is not an indication something is wrong, its just how they chose to display these events in the client, you very well could display timestamps on everything, they just chose to do it this way.
Well I was running 1.6.2, and 1.7.11 which according to my knowledge was supposed to be ok. I have always upgraded when it was told to be necessary. Upgraded to 1.8.2 when it came out. It seems, that my farmer is hitting blocks pretty consistantly, but ~4600 plot harvester has not hit a block for over 3 months! This cannot be explained by bad luck anymore. Harvester log is showing, that plots are being eligble for farming. Farmer logs show no sign of probelms and chia farm summary command is showing my harvester plots. I have no choice, but to start running fullnode also on my harvester. I’ve been disappointed with the logs for so many times during this 2+ years now. Chia network is going to need to do way better job in with problem discovery and logs in the future. If this shit is going to keep happening after the halving then I will be out. I am not here for charity. I even installed the dasboard and it shows no long validation times or anything else, that would alarm my mind. I’m not going to join the pool, because of so many OG plots. Might consider it if the gpu plotting option comes out.
there IS big issue with solo (at least) farming since 1.8. dont count on this pizza guy he is just a pitbull from corps who just try to force you to claim that YOU are idiot who cannot set your farm right. but you are not. there are lot of guys who reporting the same issue, but this is restricted topic.
to directly address your paranoia, if there were “lots of guys” reporting issues, you would see a steady stream of them on every social media platform, the likes of which would drown out any other conversation because over 75% of the network is on the latest releases and blocks are still being created without issue… so if there were “lots of guys” struggling the network would be dropping in difficulty to adjust to that, yet none of that is happening, so we’re left wondering where your proof is.
this happens every release, people claim its preventing them from winning but the network moves on just fine without radical changes you would expect to see if the rumors were true, so your myth is dead.
can people have or discover problems during updates, sure, but the vast majority of the network is doing just fine, as witnessed by existing netspace and current difficulty remaining relatively stable throughout the upgrade process, no major drops or hits as tens of thousands upgraded overnight on release, if you have some evidence other than your constant paranoia about everything, by all means present it, but its going to be pretty hard for you to beat the math being proven with every block.
So how do you explain this then? I calculated, that I should have won 14 chia in +3 months period where I have won zero with my harvester. According to my calculations it is 7.3 times over the estimate. At the same time my farmer, which has 1/3 amount of the plots has hit blocks many times. And there is NOTHING in the logs to help me solve this issue.
I guess I just need to accept it, that this has been a bad investment. Compressed plots and growth of network space make it even worse. I am an early farmer and I’m nowhere near ROI. I really wonder why the hell are people still buying drives, when the ROI is clearly far over 5 years even if you get stuff dirt cheap and have nearly free energy. Not counting in all the time and effort you need to put in.
It does go that way, I have 304 TiB now replotted to Chia Cuda C7, so just under 400 TiB effective size, or 4002 plots. Back before compression I had quite a few long dry spells, most recent long one was 406% effort, which is 4 times ETW.
I’m actually pooling on Foxy Pools, and I’ve seen the effort on there get up to 600%, and that’s a pool with almost 81 PiB and 266 farmers.
7.3 times is 730% effort, so an extreme case, but it does happen, I’ve seen mention of it happening on pools before.
My current average effort is 90% so at the moment I’m doing well, but I’ve been in this since launch and had many dry spells.
If you do want to pool there are still OG pools around, I was originally using Foxy-Pool CHIA (OG) (foxypool.io). Actually there is still 125 PiB on there, and they are currently at over 433% effort!
One thing I can agree with though, is just how difficult it is to know that your farm is healthy, I have the benefit of pooling, but the new GUI (Alpha/Beta) does introduce some stuff that should help, but it doesn’t currently explain what it means.
Well one thing I’d point out is variance does happen to others as pointed out by Ronski’s post and example about people even on pools who are clearly responding to partials to earn points but still have dry spells outside the “expected time to win” because its just an average given enough time, not a hard “you will win in this timeframe, bet on it.”
This is why pooling is favored among people, in just about every crypto, because people can’t stomach the variance, its a human issue not a math issue… having the pool request that partial every so often gives most people peace of mind because they know the software responded in as near identical way as it would with a full proof, just a lower difficulty so it can happen more frequent and let the pool estimate your size.
“so how do you explain it” often becomes the statement of someone who thinks they can beat math or avoid variance within it, so it sounds like the best thing you can do knowing the math is to pick a solution that addresses your emotions (Some people can stomach the wild swings in solo, others cannot). You may not want to join a pool, but then you’re going to have to stomach the alternative.
Stop being so emotional if you think there is no future, make the decision to move on from it. You are talking about ROI and the time it takes, well stop being so emotional and make the choice to do something about it based on whatever metrics are important to you today and in the future. If the risks are not worth it to you anymore, stop complaining and DO something about it, if your decision is to sit on your hands and whine about not getting rich on the time table you wanted, thats not a flaw with the network or anything other than your poor decisions made a while ago when you spent money without any guarantee but are now sour it didn’t turn out the way you imagined, welcome to crypto, many of us learned that lesson the hard way.
It would seem you have a decision to make, sit and whine about things, or address them.
You could progress towards joining a pool (with compressed plots to solve another issue you have), learn to live with the variance, spend more time investigating things to your satisfaction they are working, or move on to something else and liquidate or utilize the equipment elsewhere.
…but just don’t sit and whine claiming everything is broken or unfair because you don’t win on a set schedule, thats not how ANY of this works, crypto or life.
You are right I am emo about this, but for a good reason. I have tried to do something about this. Countless hours of reading forums and learning Linux. Now I need to learn how to extend the root mount, since I don’t have enough space for the DB on harvester. I know, that variance can be big, but I don’t buy the argument of variance in this case, because farmer with a lot less plots is hitting blocks way more constantly. The difference is drastic. And this bad luck actually goes beyond 3 months. I have had 30% less blocks win since the beginning of the year. Now it has just gone from bad to unbearably bad.
Don’t get me wrong. I do think this is one of the best blockchains in long term. This is why troubleshooting problems should be made easier. After all farmers are the ones who keep the whole thing running. It has to make financial sense to do this or the chain will die. I didn’t think I would “get rich quick”. Now it is about getting poor slowly, because the rewards can’t even pay for the electricity with this phase.
I will get back to report later when I get the other full node running and have some new data.
If you truly believe you have an issue and believe it to be the load on the system from this particular one having many more plots than your others, it sounds like you have an easy solution by reducing the workload, however if you make that change today and receive different results it won’t necessarily indicate you were right, it could still be variance finally swinging back your way… thats the problem with changing things and then believing its cause/effect.
So what you should be doing is looking at your existing load and response times in the log, is it truly responding in time without spikes and messages you are not responding in time. Below is a screenshot of my full node managing over 5500 plots on 45 drives responding in under a second for each signage point, you can see just how little the workload is, it just doesn’t take much.
The issue might be more complex, how is this one system different than the others (is every system a full node on its own, are they potentially conflicting at the router as a result, are they all harvesters pointing to a single farmer/node, have you tried just a simple reboot? there are so few details given what help can people offer), what do the logs say if anything on all the systems, if nothing, why do you believe its failing to work correctly, simply because your estimated time to win is not close enough despite mathematically possible? This is why people chose to join pools, ironic enough some people complain about pooling because they were on a hot streak with variance and won more blocks than they received rewards for, so those people leave the pools only to find the ugly other end of the stick and miss out on steady pool rewards during their bad streak.
Unless you have some clear sign, or even something you can point to as a potential issue, the rest is just human nature with emotions. So by all means, check the system, go over things, make sure you can rule things out, that chia logs and the system are reporting all things look good, then make a decision how you want to handle it to appease your emotions, split the load up? consider pooling? live with it? but make an effort to resolve the emotional strain because if it lingers you will act like the other guy who thinks a shifting wind impacts his blocks.
One thing I would double check is if the software is on current version with your others (and in this multi-harvester setup that your certificates are reinitialized on each one), scan the logs for “Found 1 proofs” and see if that appears with an error or warning it was unable to create a block for some reason, are there ANY errors or warnings that would impact creating a block or are they tied to unrelated things, if you just don’t find anything meaningful then circle back to resolving the emotional strain and find a way that will satisfy you, just don’t blame things without proof because it feels like a cause/effect and all you’ve got to go by is a guess, that doesn’t solve your problem at the end of the day.
Only TX blocks have a timestamp. On average every 3rd block is a TX block.
Well well well…just as I thought. Converted harvester to a second full node. “Lo and behold” I hit a block 8 days after doing the conversion, where my estimate to win for this fullnode is 13 days. So I basically went 3.5 months without a single hit with these blocks on my harvester. That is 7.69 times the estimate of today and the netspace has grown in this time, so the estimate was actually even better before. My other farmer, which estimate to win is 1 month hit many time during this 3.5 month period. I am pretty sure there was something effed up, but the logs just don’t tell NOTHING.
I will report back in a month or two to see how well has the new full node kept up with the estimate.
But you’ll probably never know whether it was something you did or just luck.
