XPlotter for optimized plots (CPU)
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While plotting multiple drives at the same time, I noticed something weird. 2 of the HDDs have extremely slow write rates, like ~3-8 mbps. Sometimes they will spike to ~40-50mbps, but always slow back down.
I've been mining on them for over a year now, and I always format/disk check before plotting (in this case, replotting), so I know the drives themselves are good. Both are internal drives: 5tb and 8tb.
BTW, my cpu is idle most of the time, and I have plenty of compute resources left even with both are generating plots, so I know I'm bottle-necked by cpu.
Any ideas?
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I can tell you one thing, if the bottleneck is your write speed, the resources being available makes sense. Xplotter writes and calculates nonces in parallel, so if your writing takes forever, then the intensive calculations will finish early and free up a lot of resources. You'll also be wasting a lot of time.
I've had this 4 TB WD HDD give me tremendously slow write speeds (and reads) and I'm starting to suspect it was the way it was formatted. I believe @haitch has mentioned it should be NTFS with 64 kb allocation size.
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@IncludeBeer said in XPlotter for optimized plots (CPU):
While plotting multiple drives at the same time, I noticed something weird. 2 of the HDDs have extremely slow write rates, like ~3-8 mbps. Sometimes they will spike to ~40-50mbps, but always slow back down.
I've been mining on them for over a year now, and I always format/disk check before plotting (in this case, replotting), so I know the drives themselves are good. Both are internal drives: 5tb and 8tb.
BTW, my cpu is idle most of the time, and I have plenty of compute resources left even with both are generating plots, so I know I'm bottle-necked by cpu.
Any ideas?
I see the same thing. That's why I run two plotters. If the one is writing slowly, the other may not be. I can see no discernable pattern. Sometimes plotter 1 is fast other times it's plotter 2. Sometimes both other times neither.
All my drives are NTSF 64kb formatted.
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@k.coins, @rds Ok, thanks guys. I'd be interested in knowing more about how the drive format affects plotting/mining. Can you elaborate, @haitch?
I just find it weird because, with the exception of my 8tb drive which has smr, all my other drives tend to write closer to ~40-60 mb/s, while these 2 are barely breaking 5mb/s. I was originally thinking it had something to do with the SATA connection, but that seems unlikely.
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@IncludeBeer Block size wouldn't make that difference. Basically the 64KB Block means on an optimized plot you read 1 64KB block, rather than 16 individual 4KB blocks. If you're not using optimized plots, use the default.
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@haitch Very cool. And there is a noticeable reduction in time to read the drive (assuming other variables are controlled)? I guess it would depend on the drive and its capacity. I'm interested....maybe I'll experiment with my 2tb drive to try and get some figures.
Does anyone mine with non-optimized plots anymore? XD
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I currently do
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When you plotting by wplotgenerator or GPU-plotter - don't unplug your drives after plotting - OS need some time (1-15 mins) for flush cache to drive
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@Blago said in XPlotter for optimized plots (CPU):
When you plotting by wplotgenerator or GPU-plotter - don't unplug your drives after plotting - OS need some time (1-15 mins) for flush cache to drive
Doesn't "Safely Remove Hardware" flush the cache before it tells you that you can remove the USB device? I wouldn't just unplug a drive without doing that under any circumstances.
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I'm just starting out with Burstcoin and my plan is to mine using 10TB. Right now, I'm plotting simultaneously on two vastly different machines. Both are writing to identical 1TB drives. One is a home-built PC with a 3-core AMD A6-3500 and 8GB of ram:

The other is an HP workstation with dual E5-2670s and 64GB of ram:

Quite a difference. :-D
As others have experienced, the bottleneck on the HP is write speed, and watching that has me wondering about how RAM and threads affect performance.
I get that the amount of RAM allocated to plotting determines the stagger size. So then is the stagger the number of nonces generated per pass ("Generating nonces from xxxxxxx to yyyyyyy")? So the more RAM allocated, the more nonces created per pass? And then the number of threads and processor speed determines how fast nonces are generated?
Thank you blago for your work on this. And thank you to everyone else contributing. I've been digging through the forums for the past few days trying to wrap my head around all this and have found a ton of great info here. I hope to be up and mining by the weekend.
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@RatPatrol better when nonces_per_thread = multiple by 1024.
In your case try -t 30 -mem 30G (will 2048)
or -t 30 -mem 45G (will 3096)
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@Blago said in XPlotter for optimized plots (CPU):
@RatPatrol better when nonces_per_thread = multiple by 1024.
In your case try -t 30 -mem 30G (will 2048)
or -t 30 -mem 45G (will 3096)Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try this weekend.
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@Blago said in XPlotter for optimized plots (CPU):
@RatPatrol better when nonces_per_thread = multiple by 1024.
In your case try -t 30 -mem 30G (will 2048)
or -t 30 -mem 45G (will 3096)@Blago didn't quite understand your tip. What do you exactly call nonces_per_thread?
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@vExact You want the memory allocated to be a 256MB multiple of the number of CPU threads you're allowing.
Basically, you want (allocated memory) / ( allocated threads) to be a number that ends in 0, 0.25, 0.5 or 0.75 for best performance.
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XPlotter_sse.exe -id 737562325338747394 -sn 1007628177 -n 3648000 -t 10 -path F:\plots -mem 20G
pauseWhy is it only using 4080 mb ram?
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Update to newest xplotter corrected it lol
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I just finished plotting a 2tb hdd with xplotter. The total time needed for plotting and optimizing is actually faster on my machine then old method. Pc didnt get as warm and seemed to run smoother. I polotted on hp z600 2x x5550 24gb ram.
Now have a couple questions and suggestions. I noticed if I plot 200gb and stop the plotter half way the file will show 200gb but doesnt say you only filled half full with nounces. Will plot checker see that? A new person might not realize what happened. Could a check be put in place to summarize what is still empty on that file or a warning?
Can you add a pause? Make program stop at certain point and restart at your command. Sometimes I run into heat issues and just letting cool down i could avoid aborting. Of course keeping computer dust free helps out too lol
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@tross said in XPlotter for optimized plots (CPU):
I just finished plotting a 2tb hdd with xplotter. The total time needed for plotting and optimizing is actually faster on my machine then old method. Pc didnt get as warm and seemed to run smoother. I polotted on hp z600 2x x5550 24gb ram.
Now have a couple questions and suggestions. I noticed if I plot 200gb and stop the plotter half way the file will show 200gb but doesnt say you only filled half full with nounces. Will plot checker see that? A new person might not realize what happened. Could a check be put in place to summarize what is still empty on that file or a warning?
Can you add a pause? Make program stop at certain point and restart at your command. Sometimes I run into heat issues and just letting cool down i could avoid aborting. Of course keeping computer dust free helps out too lol
Plotchecker won't id that half filled condition. And the file will mine with no errors. You have to run the xplotter with the parameters (starting nonce, # of nonces) of the file and watch it say that the file is done to insure the file is complete.
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@rds I know that and you know that but what new guy? There was a post how a new miner couldnt get a dl and now I think I know why. He used xplotter it may of crashed he looked at file and looks complete. checks with plot checker all is ok then he mines with no nonces and getting no errors . So there you have it we also have Ghost Nonces!
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@tross That's interesting! It could definitely make people mine ghost nonces and get no DLs if what you are saying is true.



