Cryptonight mining and RAM

[leerees]

Hi Guys,

I'm on my way to getting my Proliants ready for mining in XMRig.

How much RAM do I actually need to just run headless ubuntu with XMRig? As these servers are only used as miners I want to sell off the excess RAM to try and recoup some costs.

 

[marcoi]

i think most shot for 4-8 GB ram. I'm not sure if having ram channels not all populated will affect mining results. My guess is it will not, but might be work a test to confirm. IE run mining with all mem channels populated, then run it with just 1 stick of ram per cpu, etc.

 

[chilipepperz]

1 4gb stick per cpu works best

 

[iLya]

The only thing that you should worry about is making sure that your OS is not starved for RAM.
CryptoNote protocol is CPU L3 cache bound so you will never even utilize RAM for anything related to mining.
Example, I have a HyperV host running ~6 VMs of varying sizes and I run the miner on that host and I only get ~20-30 H/s lower than a HyperV host that has no workload on it at all. What is also interesting is that Windows seems to do better in mining than Linux.

 

[leerees]

The only thing that you should worry about is making sure that your OS is not starved for RAM.
CryptoNote protocol is CPU L3 cache bound so you will never even utilize RAM for anything related to mining.
Example, I have a HyperV host running ~6 VMs of varying sizes and I run the miner on that host and I only get ~20-30 H/s lower than a HyperV host that has no workload on it at all. What is also interesting is that Windows seems to do better in mining than Linux.

I'm getting around 280 h/s per 2620 in XMRig. Both CPU's get 480 h/s. I saw another thread saying about their rigs slowing down with only 8gb but I've not seen that on my servers. They are basic ubuntu, once I get my new CPU's I'll upgrade and build headless servers.

 

[onsit]

I noticed degraded performance running 1 stick of ram per motherboard, went to 1 stick of ram per CPU and got expected results.

 

[leerees]

Thanks for the feedback, going to stick with 2 8 gb sticks in dual channel mode.

 

[iLya]

To give you an idea, I have a Dell C6220 node running with 2x E5-2670 V1 and populated with 128GB Ram that gets me a combined rate of ~970 H/s using Windows Server 2016.
I have a Dell C8220 bare MB with 2x E5-2680 V1 with 1 x 8GB (the smallest stick that I had) running WinPE 1703 and that gets me ~965 H/s

 

[sharpnel]

1 stick of ram is more than enough if you want to have the best perf/watt.

 

[leerees]

1 stick of ram is more than enough if you want to have the best perf/watt.

Does having 2 sticks of ram use a lot more wattage? How many watts are we talking, for me perf/watt is important as in the UK we pay a lot for electricity.

As it stands my dual 2620 rig is using bang on 150w, I'm currently hashing at 510h/s in XMRig. I got it up from 480h/s by some more tweaking.

 

[Evan]

Each stick say 2-3 watts under some load , depends what ram though

 

[leerees]

Each stick say 2-3 watts under some load , depends what ram though

You are correct, I found exactly the same, one of my servers had 16GB (4 sticks), I pulled the other 3 out and saved 3w, didn't loose any hashing power either. Every watt counts.