PowerPool

A gevent based Stratum mining pool server.

Features

Lightweight, asynchronous, gevent based internals.
Built in HTTP statistics/monitoring server.
Flexible statistics collection engine.
Multiple coinserver (RPC server) support for redundancy. Support for coinserver prioritization.
Celery driven share logging allows multiple servers to log shares and statistics to a central source for easy scaling out.
SHA256, X11, scrypt, and scrypt-n support
Support for merge mining multiple auxilury (merge mined) blockchains
Modular architecture makes customization simple(r)

Uses Celery to log shares and statistics for miners. Work generation and (bit|lite|alt)coin data structure serialization is performed by Cryptokit and connects to bitcoind using GBT for work generation (or getauxblock for merged work). Currently only Python 2.7 is supported.

Built to power the SimpleDoge mining pool.

Donate

If you feel so inclined, you can give back to the devs at the below addresses.

DOGE DAbhwsnEq5TjtBP5j76TinhUqqLTktDAnD

BTC 185cYTmEaTtKmBZc8aSGCr9v2VCDLqQHgR

VTC VkbHY8ua2TjxdL7gY2uMfCz3TxMzMPgmRR

Getting Setup

The only external service PowerPool relies on in is its Celery broker. By default this will be RabbitMQ on a local connection, so simply having it installed will work fine.

sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server

Setup a virtualenv and install...

mkvirtualenv pp  # if you've got virtualenvwrapper...
# Install all of powerpools dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Install powerpool
pip install -e .
# Install the hashing algorithm modules
pip install vtc_scrypt  # for scryptn support
pip install drk_hash  # for x11 support
pip install ltc_scrypt  # for scrypt support
pip install git+https://github.com/BlueDragon747/Blakecoin_Python_POW_Module.git@e3fb2a5d4ea5486f52f9568ffda132bb69ed8772#egg=blake_hash

Now copy config.yml.example to config.yml. All the defaults are commented out and mandatory fields are uncommented. Fill out all required fields and you should be good to go for testing.

pp config.yml

And now your stratum server is running. Point a miner at it on localhost:3333 (or more specifically, stratum+tcp://localhost:3333 and do some mining. View server health on the monitor port at http://localhost:3855. Various events will be getting logged into RabbitMQ to be picked up by a celery worker. See Simple Coin for a reference implementation of Celery task handler.

Architecture Overview

Reporter The reporter is responsible for transmitting shares, mining statistics, and new blocks to some external storage. The reference implementation is the CeleryReporter which aggregates shares into batches and logs them in a way designed to interface with SimpleCoin. The reporter is also responsible for tracking share rates for vardiff. This makes sense if you want vardiff to be based off the shares per second of an entire address, instead of a single connection.

Jobmanager This module generates mining jobs and sends them to workers. It must provide current jobs for the stratum server to be able to push. The reference implementation monitors an RPC daemon server.

Server This is a singleton class that holds statistics and references to all other modules. All components get access to this object, which is largely concerned with handling startup and shutdown, along with statistics rotation.

Stratum Manager Handles spawning one or many stratum servers (which bind to a single port each), as well as spawning corresponding agent servers as well. It holds data structures that allow lookup of all StratumClient objects.

Stratum Server A server that listens to a single port and accepts new stratum clients.

Agent Server A server that listens to a single port and accepts new ppagent connections.

Setting up push block notifications (optional)

To check for new blocks Powerpool defaults to polling each of the coinservers you configure. It just runs the rpc call 'getblockcount' 5x/second (configurable) to see if the block height has changed. If it has changed, it runs getblocktemplate to grab the new info.

Since polling creates a 100ms delay (on average) for detecting new blocks one optimization is to configure the coinservers to push PowerPool a notification when they accept a new block. Since this reduces the delay to <1ms you'll end up with fewer orphans. The impact of the faster speed is more pronounced with currencies that have shorter block times.

Although this is an improvement, its worth mentioning that it is pretty minor. We're talking about shaving off ~100ms or so, which should reduce orphan percentages by ~0.01% - 0.1%, depending on block times. Miners often connect with far more latency than this.

How it push block works

Standard Bitcoin/Litecoin based coinservers have a built in config option to allow executing a script right after a new block is discovered. We want to run a script that notifies our PowerPool process to check for a new block.

To accomplish this PowerPool has built in support for receiving a UDP datagram on its monitor port. The basic system flow looks like this:

Coinserver -> Learns of new block Coinserver -> Executes blocknotify script (Alertblock) Alertblock -> Parses the passed in .push file Alertblock -> Sends a UDP datagram based on that .push file PowerPool -> Receives UDP datagram PowerPool -> Runs getblocktemplate on the Coinserver

Note: Using a pushblock script to deliver a UDP datagram to PowerPool can be accomplished in many different ways. We're going to walk through how we've set it up on our own servers, but please note if your server configuration/architechture differs much from ours you may have to adapt this guide.

Modify the coinserver's config

This is the part that tells the coinserver what script to run when it learns of a new block.

blocknotify=/usr/bin/alertblock /home/USER/coinserver_push/vertcoin.push

You'll want something similar to this in each coinserver's config. Make sure to restart it after.

Alertblock script

Now that the coin server is trying to run /usr/bin/alertblock, you'll need to make that Alertblock script.

Open your text editor of choice and save this to /usr/bin/alertblock

#!/bin/bash
cat $1 | xargs -P 0 -d '\n' -I ARGS bash -c 'a="ARGS"; args=($a); echo "${args[@]:2}" | nc -4u -w0 -q1 ${args[@]:0:2}'
# For testing the command
#cat $1 | xargs -P 0 -td '\n' -I ARGS bash -xc 'a="ARGS"; args=($a); echo "${args[@]:2}" | nc -4u -w0 -q1 ${args[@]:0:2}'

Block .push script

Now your Alertblock script will be looking for a /home/USER/coinserver_push/vertcoin.push file. The data in this file is interpreted by the Alertblock script. It looks at each line and tries to send a UDP packet based on the info. The .push file might contain something like this:

127.0.0.1 6855 VTC getblocktemplate signal=1 __spawn=1

Basically, this tells the Alertblock script to send a UDP datagram to 127.0.0.1 on port 6855. PowerPool will parse the datagram and run getblocktemplate for the currency VTC.

The port (6855) should be the monitor port for the stratum process you want to send the notification to. The currency code (VTC) should match one of the configured currencies in that stratum's config.

If you need to push to multiple monitor ports just do something like:

127.0.0.1 6855 VTC getblocktemplate signal=1 __spawn=1
127.0.0.1 6856 VTC getblocktemplate signal=1 __spawn=1

For merge mined coins you'll want something slightly different:

127.0.0.1 6855 DOGE _check_new_jobs signal=1 _single_exec=True __spawn=1

Powerpool config

Now we need to update PowerPool's config to not poll, as it is no longer needed, and makes the coinserver's logs a lot harder to use. All that needs to be done is set the poll key to False for each currency you have push block setup for.

VTC:
    poll: False
    type: powerpool.jobmanagers.MonitorNetwork
    algo: scryptn
    currency: VTC
    etc...

Confirm it is working

You'll want to double check push block notifications are actually working as planned. The easiest way is to visit PowerPool's monitoring endpoint and look for the last_signal key. It should be updated each time PowerPool is notified of a block via push block.

License

BSD

License

sigwo/powerpool

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