Quote from: allcoinminer on August 04, 2014, 07:44:29 PM

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

Dogie, I really appreciate whatever you do for the community, hope everyone else does too. You are one dedicated person, I would like to see more like you on bitcointalk. Just want to give you a friendly suggestion: it is not embarrassing, if you are not aware of something, you can just say "I don't know". Please, avoid taking advantage of your reputation for making false statements.

Thank you.

Quote from: dbbrummel on August 03, 2014, 09:46:44 PM

Best of Both Worlds
-------------------

I hate long blocks, like everyone, and I hate pool hopping, because it never works.
So, here is what I did. Your mileage may vary.

For all my miners, I added ghash.io as a failover pool, Slush is primary.

Then, on the configuration page for the Antminer S3 miners, I changed 'Pool Balance' from Failover to Balance.
Initially this did not work so great, and Ghash was rejecting a lot of shares. After
looking around a bit, the reason became clear. Slush was sending me work with a
difficulty of around 128 +/-, and Ghash was sending me work with a difficulty of
1024. 50% of a S3 is not up to that.

The good news is that Ghash allows you to set the difficulty of your work. So, I went
to the workers section and set all of my miners to 128, then rebooted them all. The
rejections went way down.

Next, I let them run about 10 minutes so Slush could score them, and again updated
their difficulty to match what Slush was using.

All 8 of the S3 miners are now showing about 200 GH/s +/- on both Slush and Ghash.
Perfect.

The Antminer S2 does not have the balance option, but I wanted it to do the same thing.

So I found this link searching on Google:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20992/can-i-set-up-cgminer-to-mine-in-different-pools-by-a-defined-ratio

I suppose it will work for anyone using CGMiner, but just tried it on my S2.
I changed the quota numbers to 50 for Slush, 50 for Ghash.

Don't forget to add the last line: "load-balance" : true,

Oh, and on the S2, you will find the config files in /config instead of /etc/config, and the pw is admin, not root like on the S1 and S3.

Anyway, now all 9 miners are balancing successfully between Slush and Ghash. I have 9 legs on a roller coaster and the other 9 on a freight train ... doesn't sound healthy, but so far, so good.