THE CHIA FARM

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Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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gtech1 said:
With a single one you'd be doing 8
Click to expand...
I am running 3 plots with 1 iodrive2 card,
I do not have a destination drive, 1 iodrive2 card need to hold 300 gb plots and plotting temp files as well.

I am not sure about speed, assume the ram is the slowest , I brought the cheap server ddr4 ram back in 2018-2019.
 
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Marsh

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Ebay sellers dumped their Fusion-io SSD inventories back in 2019.

I had the iodrive card, solution waiting for the right problem to come along.
 
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Marsh

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I want to add,

I have 2 low end machines , each one is producing 12 plots a day.
They are the working mules , while I am tweaking the big machines.

Low end machine, E5-1240 v3 , 32 gb ram , 2 x 1.6tb iodrive2 SSD.
 
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NateS

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Apr 19, 2021
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gtech1 said:
How are you guys getting 40-50 plots per day ? Does CPU speed matter that much ?
I have a dual xeon e5-2620v2 running 4 plots staggered via plotman ( Ubuntu ) on a single Fusion IO card and it barely does 8 plots per day. I can't image the Fusion-IO card being the bottleneck...or could it ?
Click to expand...
CPU speed matters a lot. Once your storage is "fast enough", you quickly become limited by single core CPU speed -- only the first of the four phases is multi-threaded at all, and even phase 1 isn't very threaded as you get diminishing returns with more than 2-4. If you have a lot of slow cores instead of a few fast ones, you generally need to attach a lot of storage and run a lot of plots in parallel to make good use of that system.

And "fast enough" isn't huge. I believe it's less than 500MB/s per plot, maybe a bit more in phase 1 and less in the others. But you need drives with good sustained write speed, as the amount of data will quickly overwhelm any caches. Decent Nand drives can do this okay if you don't run too many plots in parallel on them at once, though endurance can be an issue. Optane or ramdisks are overkill speed-wise, but won't wear out as fast as Nand drives will. HDDs can actually be an okay choice, especially if your CPU isn't very fast, and you have enough HDDs to do only one plot at a time on each one, so that the head isn't jumping around between multiple plotting processes.
 
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bash

bash

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The whole process is hard to optimize or create generalizations about what is optimal because as NateS mentions CPU Speed/Core count will change how you wan't to set your system up.

On my EPYC 7401P I actually have more consumer NVME's added to the server to optimize plots per day. My 5950X smokes the 7401P on plot time with same NVME because of speed of cores.

I am around 200 plots/day across 5 servers at the moment.
 
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gtech1

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May 27, 2019
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Jeezus...my hardware is not meant for this.

So that Ryzen with 16 cores apparently has higher performance than my 2 x e5-4627v2 @ 3.3ghz which also have 16 cores total.

I'm just going according to CPU Benchmark here which gives the Ryzena score of 46 000 and one 4627 a score of 9600.

How can this be ?

As far as plotting goes, I'm doing 4 in parallel, each to its own Intel S4510 drive and I still can only do one plot every 7h. For a grand total of 10 per day.
 
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Marsh

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Single core CPU performance.

I buy Intel S1200v3 mb , CPU E3-1240v3 or 1230v3 with 16gb or 32gb ram for around $40-$80 each.
I already owned 8 such low end system. bump the ram to 32gb , add couple of $100 fusion-io card.

Without much tweaking, out of the box , could do 6 plots around 10 hrs, = 12 to 13 plots a day.

My original idea is farm only with 2 x 14tb. No buying any expensive hardware. Self impose control.
But Chia farming is addictive.

So now, I am at the crossroad to make some decision,
divert 100tb from my 400tb backup space to farming or not.
 
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gtech1

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May 27, 2019
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Marsh said:
Single core CPU performance.

I buy Intel S1200v3 mb , CPU E3-1240v3 or 1230v3 with 16gb or 32gb ram for around $40-$80 each.
I already owned 8 such low end system. bump the ram to 32gb , add couple of $100 fusion-io card.

Without much tweaking, out of the box , could do 6 plots around 10 hrs, = 12 to 13 plots a day.

My original idea is farm only with 2 x 14tb. No buying any expensive hardware. Self impose control.
But Chia farming is additive.

So now, I am at the crossroad to make some decision,
divert 100tb from my 400tb backup space to farming or not.
Click to expand...
I must be doing something wrong. I also have a similar setup, running:

E3-1270v6 with 64gb of 2400mhz ram.


Since this CPU only has 4 cores, I run 2 plots staggered about 2h apart, each to its own S4510 SSD. I do 6.5 plots per day..
 
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Marsh

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My run script

first group using /mnt/fio1
chia1 sleep 0m
chia2 sleep 80m
chia3 sleep 160m

second group using /mnt/fio2
chia4 sleep 40m
chia5 sleep 120m
chia6 sleep 200m

if [ $(hostname -s ) = "chiaplot2" ] ; then

echo $0 > /home/user/logs/start

screen -d -m -S chia1 bash -c 'cd /home/user/chia-blockchain && . ./activate && sleep 0m && chia plots create -k 32 -b 3408 -e -r 2 -u 128 -n 1 -t /mnt/fio1/chia1 -d /mnt/fio1/chia1 -f fp -p | tee /home/user/logs/chia1.log'

repeat 5 more times

fi
 
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csp-guy

Active Member
Jun 26, 2019
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OK, Guys, what about Epyc 7551/128GB RAM and Intel 4TB P4510, Optane 900P 280 GB, plus 4X 5 TB WD RED HDD, 3TB Hitachi HDD? Is it enough for fast mining?

What would be the recommended configuration?
 
msg7086

msg7086

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That said, single threaded performance only affects single plot plotting time, however the total throughput still relates to total CPU performance. While a Ryzen plots much faster for single plot, if you run enough in parallel the E5 or EPYC can be higher on throughput.

The sweet spot is at [2 threads : 3.75G ram : 270GB storage space] for each plot.
 
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bash

bash

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csp-guy said:
OK, Guys, what about Epyc 7551/128GB RAM and Intel 4TB P4510, Optane 900P 280 GB, plus 4X 5 TB WD RED HDD, 3TB Hitachi HDD? Is it enough for fast mining?

What would be the recommended configuration?
Click to expand...
The following is a 7401P with 2 x 4TB 4510's.



  • If I had to do it over again I would have gotten 4x 2 TB instead of the 2x 4TB 4510's,
  • I think I can squeeze out more plots/day by increasing parallel plots and playing with stagger times.
  • Too many in parallel and avg plot time will shoot up to over 12-14 hours per plot even with enterprise NVME.
 
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csp-guy

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Jun 26, 2019
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Hungary, Budapest
Thanks Rand__!

I tested my ram with imdisk virtual disk. 3900MB/3900MB - read/write/seconds.

I try to use one plot only, with a lot of thread. :)
 
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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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As the other thread mentioned, plot write speed seems to be capped at some 500-700 MB/s, so faster drive only helps so much.
 
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