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I've been running a small pool with friends for several days with few blocks mined (yay!). I am running Clintar's fork of the pool code: https://github.com/clintar/cryptonote-xmr-pool

Now I know the code is open so I can start digging. I'm a professional software developer, so this is something I intend to do at some point, but I need to improve my general knowledge of Monero first.

Are there "standard" configurations I could set the improve my pool's performance without changing the actual code? Like connecting it to several nodes in a hope to receive chain updates possibly faster?

I know my question is a bit vague, but I don't exactly know where to start. Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me!

user36303
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It is possible to run several nodes, in a load balancing way. I know of at least one pool which does this (crypto-pool.fr). The specifics, however, I can't say.

The usual suspects: faster CPU, faster network connection. For the latter, this may come in handy if you end up DDoSed. Unfortunately, there are DDoS campaigns from time to time on pools. Whether this comes from competing pools or just generic jerk kids, I don't know. But they come and go.

I see two ways you might improve performance if you want to change the code (first one is an already available change):

  • improve the performance of the daemon which supplies the pool with the block templates. There is a patch that exists (https://github.com/moneromooo-monero/bitmonero/tree/cache-block-template) which does this, and is said to reduce the CPU load a lot

  • improve the performance of checking miner shares. There are two ways to do this: skip some (there is a "trusted shares" setting in the pool config.json which you can tweak, it's a tuning where the more you trust miners, the less the CPU load on checking), and using AES-NI for the Cryptonight calculation (I'm not aware of a public patch for this though).

I'm sure there are other things you could look at, but these are two of the main ones that come to mind.

user36303
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