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 under normal operation (one for the stratum clients and one for the web UI clients). It gets away with this thanks to the efficiency of both LMDB and libevent (for the stratum clients) and some sensible proxying/caching being placed in front of the web UI.

This pool was the first pool to support RandomX and is currently the only pool which supports the RandomX fast/full-memory mode.

The single payout mechanism is PPLNS, which favors loyal pool miners, and there are no plans to add any other payout mechanisms or other coins. Work should stay focussed on performance, efficiency and stability.

The pool also supports a new, experimental and optional, method of mining, whereby miners select their own block template to mine on. Further information can be found in stratum-ss.md.

For testing, a reference mainnet pool can be found at monerop.com.

Compiling from source

Dependencies

The build system 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
• 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 uuid-dev

Compile

After installing all the dependencies as described above, 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

During compilation, a copy of pool.conf is placed in the output build directory. Edit this file as you see fit. When running the pool, if a custom location is not set via the command-line parameter --config-file <file>, the pool will first look for this file in the same directory as the pool binary, then in the current users home directory. The configuration options should all be self explanatory.

There are also some command-line parameters which can be used to override some of these settings.

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 your pool config file.

It is highly recommended to run these on the same host as the pool server to avoid any network latency when their RPC methods are called.

Then simply cd build/[debug|release] and run ./monero-pool.

Command-line parameters

A few of the configuration options can be overridden via the following command-line parameters:

-c, --config-file <file>
-l, --log-file <file>
-b, --block-notified [0|1]
-d, --data-dir <dir>
-p, --pid-file <file>
-f, --forked [0|1]

Web UI

There is a minimal web UI that gets served on the port specified in the config file. If you plan on running a public pool, it's advisable to use either Apache or Nginx as a proxy in front of this with some appropriate caching configured. The goal is to offload browser based traffic to something built for the task and allow the pool to focus on its primary function - serving miners.

If you intend to make changes to the web UI, note that the HTML gets compiled into the pool binary. The single web page that gets served simply makes use of a JSON endpoint to populate the stats.

SSL

The pool has been tested behind both HAProxy and stunnel, so if you wish to provide SSL access to the pool, these are both good options and simple to setup. The reference pool makes use of HAProxy and port 4343 for SSL traffic.

The web UI, as mentioned above, should ideally be placed behind a caching proxy. Therefore SSL termination should be be configured there (i.e. in Apache/Nginx).

Help / Contact

If you need help setting up your own pool, you can find me (jtgrassie) on IRC in #monero-pool and many of the other Monero channels.

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.