Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: [Awesome Miner]- Powerful Windows GUI to manage and monitor up to 5000 miners
by
patrike
on 06/06/2017, 09:40:35 UTC
Looking pretty good, bought a large license so threw some money your way today.
Still needs some polish, specifically with adding devices.
First of all, thanks for putting all this feedback together. I will comment on some of the items below, but keep in mind that I do take notes of all suggestions - so some of your points will be, or already are, planned for the future even if I don't add any specific comment.

-When you add a device through scanning the network it shouldn't add the device based on IP, it should be based on computer name. Almost all miners will have dynamic IP allocation and adding IPs is a fools errand.
I can plan to add a setting for this when you do the network scanning. Although using DHCP is common, most routers assign the same IP to the same computer (MAC address) all the time. However, a router can fail and be replaced, so I do see your point. I've actually never had a request on this in the past, and there are people using Awesome Miner with very large numbers of miners.

-You should be allowed to mass add devices through the network.
Isn't that the network scanning you refered to above? Some people use it to add hundreds of miners at a time.

-Adding a 'host' still shouldn't be a thing, the device name should be the hostname. Perhaps allowing you to custom overide it. Right now you have to click through adding a hosts dialogue box which is a waste of time.
When you add multiple miners using the network scan, you don't have to create the hosts. They are created automatically. I do understand that you don't want to use this feature now because of the IP vs hostname point above, but this is still just a result of not using the network scan.

-If you add more then 10 devices it should display a warning and tell you that you should probably enable performance mode (AM basically becomes unresponsive at that point).
I just investigated this one and actually found a bug introduced in the recent 3.0 release, where you sometimes when adding new miners run into this. I correction will be available soon. Performance mode is intended for much more miners than that.

-With the addition of GPU OCing through AM via Afterburner there needs to be a distinction between what the miner is reporting and what the system sees as devices. As you know a CUDA or OCL device may not be directly named the same as the way the system sees it. I see that you allow people to change the order of the devices through map to system monitoring. I'm not sure what's being reported by the miner, through CUDA/OCL, and through the system. Trying to figure out what connects to what is very convoluted.
Different mining software reports the GPU's in different orders, and sometimes you don't even assign all GPU's on the system to the same mining software. The same mining software can also report GPU orders differently depending on custom command line parameters. In addition to all that, you can run Ethereum mining on two GPU's and Zcash mining on the other three for example. The only way to support this is to force the user to do some mapping. At first I was thinking of trying to match simliar fan speeds and temperatures to automatically do the mapping, but that's not stable enough.

-For some reason powertune stats aren't being displayed on the GPU tab.
That one is only available from some mining software, like sgminer. So why don't Awesome Miner bring in this value just like GPU and memory clock? The monitoring library currently used to get GPU information can actually not read the powertune value.

This also brings us to another point about how Awesome Miner get the GPU information. First of all it uses the information from the mining software. When using the mapping feature, you can bring in the GPU monitoring information that Awesome Miner itself (with help of a monitoring library) can get. By doing this all users of Awesome Miner can get much more GPU information without even running MSI Afterburner.

At the moment, MSI Afterburner is only used to set GPU parameters (the GPU clocking dialog), not to display them on the GPU tab. This is subject to change, because if you do run Afterburner, it would of course be fully possible to use the display values from there. There are however fewer users that will run Afterburner, so it will not be available for everyone. In the future there will probably be some concept where Afterburner data will be used if available, and than fallback to the GPU monitoring that is always available in Awesome Miner.

-For some reason you have to click on map to system monitoring > display system monitoring data in the GPU tab in order for the GPU tab to actually become active (why is this a option?)
This is to force the user to look at the list of GPU's and consider the mapping. If I would just bring in the GPU monitoring information right away, it would be so many questions from users about GPU statistics not being displayed correctly.

-CPU monitoring doesn't seem to work. That can be monitored through Afterburner as well. AB has built in monitoring for that.
CPU monitoring information is unfortunately only available if you run a process as Administrator. If you would run Awesome Miner Remote Agent as administrator, you would probably see more info.

MSI Afterburner always runs as Administrator and will of course have access to this information. This relates to the point earlier that Afterburner isn't used for monitoring yet.

-In the compact list view when you're looking at GPUs it only displays the temperature of one GPU, instead of this you could simply seperate all the GPUs with a comma so you can display all the GPUs from a system there for easy to read access.
The default is to show the highest temperature in the miner list. You can change to show all temperatures using the Options dialog, General section, "Temperature display".

-With GPU overclocking you need to be able to manually enter in a number instead of using sliders. Text entry next to the slider?
Yes, I've recently implemented that and it will be released today. I was also going crazy on this when I was doing GPU clocking.

-For some reason clicking on 'GPU settings' under 'Tools' gives me the AB/AB service is not installed instead of displaying AB for all systems.
Please try again in the next release, because I've made some changes to this after getting a few similar reports the last week.

Is there a way to start a miner with a lower process priority? Normally you do something like this with a batchfile 'start /low ccminer COMMANDS'
No. Do you want this for all mining software, or only specific? The reason why I'm asking is if this could be a global setting to control this behavior.

Thanks!