What to monitor for optimised setup for proof wins?

Chia Farming & Harvesting
1

Hello
I was wondering what people are monitoring or watching or checking to ensure their chance of winning is best as can be. I know you can run plot check but what then? Personally I see my plots regular pass a filter, I ran plot check and I get a bag of mixed results from 0.6 to 1.8sec, which I think is normal. Is that it?
Any pings to server for network latency? and other variables to watch?
Thanks in advance?

2

My Log file says 0 plots were eligible for farming… is that normal?

3

That is normal. Every plot file has a 1 in 512 chance of being eligible for each signing point. How many plots to you have? You should see non zero values at some point as well.

This is my stat script, it just parses the log files: dotfiles/chia-stats at master · aarcro/dotfiles · GitHub

4

Hey
I just ran - * Select-String -Path “~\.chia\mainnet\log\debug*” -Pattern “eligible”
Got a ton of those 0 values.
I have 220 plots

5

Of course you do. /Any/ non zero? How long have you been farming?

chia plots check will tell you if your files are ok.

If you’re not doing any weird NAS stuff, it’s probably fine.

6

Thanks man
yeah non zero stuff if i run plots check with values between 0.6 and 1.4 i noticed randomly. Farming for about 2 weeks maybe 3 weeks, a bit of a blur. No NAS just old fashioned HDD

7

C plots were eligible for farming B... Found P proofs. Time: T s. Total X plots

Those T values need to always be < 30 seconds, you won’t get any obvious error if they are not, you don’t want those times to be high when C = 1 or to creep up when C > 1.

I run chiadog on my farmer, it will tell you when the challenge time is high, when you skip signage points (totally miss out on eligibility for blocks), or when your farmer seems to be offline. Also checks other things like plots disappearing.

1 Like
8

Thanks for that its interesting.
So in general you can monitor but in the end is there anything to do or change or improve. Do you just cop what you get.

9

Not sure exactly what you mean by the last sentence, but depending on what issues you find there is almost certainly things you can do, when I’ve had slow challenge times I’ve always been able to work out why - but will depend on your configuration. A few random things that can cause challenge time to be high:

  • too many USB disks on the same physical bus
  • a SAS/SATA disk that is failing to mount
  • doing heavy plotting on the same machine that’s farming
  • sure there are plenty of other possible causes

For skipped signage points/network, just general network configuration really - I use a dedicated NIC for my main-node since I noticed traffic on the link that copies new plots from plotters → farmer could be a bit congested, but I could also have throttled those copies to leave headroom.

Probably easier to find out what (if any) issues there are and then look at them individually.