Adventures in Chia

Chia 2.0 was released on the 24th of August with support for compressed plots. Unfortunately you will need 416GB of free memory to compute them on CPU or you'll need a Nvidia GPU with CUDA support. Most desktop CPU's only support 128GB of memory so that means a server grade machine or a GPU. Hopefully a later release of the Bladebit plotter will support disk-based plots with compression. After upgrading my full node to 2.0 all my harvesters were unable to communicate so I had to upgrade  them to 2.0 as well. To get support for compressed plots you need to tell the harvester(s) the parallel_cpu count and the number of threads they can use. Unfortunately there is no configuration option to do this via the command line so you'll need to manually edit config.yaml if you don't have access to the GUI. Apart from the additional CPU usage expect an additional 500MB of memory use on each harvester. One of the new features in the new GUI is latency stats for each harvester. My P...

Time for an update. I have 1562 plots taking 154.6 TiB scattered across 4 machines. Primary storage server Ryzen 5600X with 128GB of ECC memory 10GbE network card 8 port SAS controller in HBA mode 10 x 16TB HDD Secondary storage server Intel i3-8100U with 64GB of ECC memory 10GbE network card 4 port SATA card 7 x 8TB HDD Pi storage servers x2 Raspberry Pi4 4GB 2 x 18TB HDD via its USB 3 ports I have filled the two Pi storage servers with 290 plots each. They have a pair of Seagate Expansion 18TB drives using the Pi's USB3 ports. I left around 500GB free space on them but after running a btrfs defrag they now have no free space. It should have released the space after each file. Regardless I am running Chia in harvester mode on each one. I could create a plot in 40 minutes but it takes another 20 minutes to get the file onto the Pi due to the 1 gigabit network port. I have filled out the secondary storage server. Its got 397 plots. At the moment I am filling out the primary storage...