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High Hardware Error Rate on Start w/ Futurebit Apollo

Posted: Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:16 pm
by azereki
I used the configurator to get the default options for my Futurebit Apollo scrypt miner and pointed it at the pool, I am noticing that it takes a long time to start up, skipping over the first coin in fact and going directly to LTC.

After a short period the hardware error rate skyrockets up to 30% and the hashrate declines dramatically. The error rate seems to slowly stabilize around 14-15%, with my hashrate ultimately being stuck around 80-90. I am using it in Eco mode, which should provide roughly at least 100 Mh/s.

Worth nothing, I don't experience this issue with others pools, such as litecoinpool. I wouldn't mind pointing my Scrypt miner at Prohashing, but this hit to hashrate is untenable and I don't want to inadvertently crash my miner, any possible solutions?

Edit: I don't know if this is the root problem or not. It looks like while having a failover pool set, perhaps because of the delay of initially getting work, the miner is considering Prohashing as simultaneously being in an active and fail state and sending some hash power to the failover pool. Perhaps this is causing a problem with the difficulty calculation from Prohashing and causing the error rate when switching between currently mined coins? Disabling the backup pool altogether, which is non-ideal, seems to resolve the HW error and reduced hashing state.

Re: High Hardware Error Rate on Start w/ Futurebit Apollo

Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2021 3:41 pm
by azereki
Got an answer on bitcointalk that explains the problem, just in case anyone else encountered a similar issue:
You can only use two or more pools, if they are both mining the same coin. If you use multipools, use only one (no failover). This is a bfgminer known problem.

Re: High Hardware Error Rate on Start w/ Futurebit Apollo

Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2021 4:15 pm
by Steve Sokolowski
Thanks for posting this solution. This will help us resolve some support tickets that come in which we have been unable to reproduce. In the future, I'll know to consider this possibility.