4.6 KiB
monero-pool
A Monero mining pool server written in C.
Design decisions are focused on performance and efficiency, hence the use of libevent and LMDB. Currently it uses only two threads (one for the stratum clients and one for the web UI clients). It gets away with this thanks to the efficiency of libevent (for the stratum clients) and some sensible proxying/caching being placed in front of the web UI.
The single payout mechanism is PPLNS, which favors loyal pool miners.
I have no plans to add any other payout mechanisms or other coins. Work should stay focussed on performance, efficiency and stability.
The pool also now supports a new, experimental and optional, method of mining for the pool miners, whereby miners can select their own block template to mine on. Further information can be found in stratum-ss.md.
Project status
I have tested this quite a bit on the Monero testnet (if you plan
to do the same, ensure to use --testnet flag when starting your wallet and
daemon) and mainnet, but there is always room for improvement. Please see the
TODO file for the current list of things that could do with looking
at.
There is also a reference mainnet pool setup and running at http://monerop.com.
If you want to help with testing or help setting up your own pool, give me a shout on IRC: jtgrassie on Freenode.
Compiling from source
Dependencies
The build system now requires the Monero source tree to be cloned and compiled. Follow the instructions for compiling Monero, then export the following variable:
export MONERO_ROOT=/path/to/cloned/monero
Replacing the path appropriately.
Beyond the Monero dependencies, the following extra libraries are also required to build the pool:
- liblmdb
- libevent
- json-c
- libmicrohttpd
- uuid
As an example, on Ubuntu, these dependencies can be installed with the following command:
sudo apt-get install liblmdb-dev libevent-dev libjson-c-dev libmicrohttpd-dev uuid-dev
Compile
First install all the dependencies as described above.
Then to compile the pool as a release build, run:
make release
The application will be built in build/release/.
Optionally you can compile a debug build by simply running:
make
Debug builds are output in build/debug/.
Configuration
Copy and edit the pool.conf file to either the same directory as the compiled
binary monero-pool, or place it in your home directory or launch monero-pool
with the flag --config-file path/to/pool.conf to use a custom location. The
configuration options should be self explanatory.
Block notification
There is one configuration option that deserves a special mention.
You can optionally start the pool with the flag --block-notified (or set in
the config file: block-notified = 1). This will prevent the pool from
polling for new blocks using a timer, and instead, fetch a new block template
when it receives a signal (specifically, SIGUSR1). Now whenever you start
monerod, you'll make use of its --block-notify option.
E.g.
monerod ... --block-notify '/usr/bin/pkill -USR1 monero-pool'
This instructs monerod to send the required signal, SIGUSR1, to your pool
whenever a new block is added to the chain.
Using this mechanism has a significant benefit - your pool immediatley knows when to fetch a new block template to send to your miners. You're essentially giving your miners a head-start over miners in pools which use polling (which is what all the other pool implementations do).
Running
Ensure you have your Monero daemon (monerod) and wallet RPC
(monero-wallet-rpc) up and running with the correct host and port settings as
defined in the pool config file.
It is highly recommended to run these on the same host as the pool server to avoid network latency when their RPC methods are called.
Then simply cd build/debug|release and run ./monero-pool.
Web UI
There is a minimal web UI that gets served on the port specified in the config file. It's advisable to use either Apache or Nginx as a proxy in front of this with some appropriate caching.
Supporting the project
This mining pool has no built-in developer donation (like other mining pool software has), so if you use it and want to donate, XMR donations to:
451ytzQg1vUVkuAW73VsQ72G96FUjASi4WNQse3v8ALfjiR5vLzGQ2hMUdYhG38Fi15eJ5FJ1ZL4EV1SFVi228muGX4f3SV
would be very much appreciated.
License
Please see the LICENSE file.