Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: [400GH/s] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool
by
sharky112065
on 31/10/2012, 20:58:34 UTC
https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/commit/38d9d89a88086abe219a270f43e940f074066cd7 :
Quote
decremented desired_version to 7 to prevent switchover for now

Does anyone have an explanation for this? Huh
Ye, I was surprised by growing v7 from thin air lol. Why we want to delay switch to v8? Forrestv found some  bad buggys?

Yes, there's a bug that Smoovius reported on the Litecoin P2Pool, which would also apply to the Bitcoin one. P2Pool's memory usage can grow without bound after a fork like this if you maintain connections to people mining on both forks. P2Pool is unable to forget about the children of the root node that connects the two forks, due to that operation simply not being implemented. (I assumed that one fork would always lose eventually, resulting in a linear chain whose last node can be forgotten about.)

Anyway, it's fixed in git, and after some more testing, I'll release v9 and the switchover will be triggered when v9 becomes popular. Restarting P2Pool after the switch would have been enough to fix this, but many people don't have something auto-restarting P2Pool if it crashes or even check up on it often.

The switchover happened on the Litecoin P2Pool about a week ago, and went flawlessly other than this issue.

Well thanks to Smoovius for finding it and to you for fixing it.

What is the plan for ASIC's? Will it require a switchover as well? If it requires a switchover, why not do it now instead of waiting until ASIC's are already out and about?