How do I see progress when mining with primecoin-qt.exe?

[Sharky444]

I'm testing out primecoins. Mining on ypool with two workers and testing a core i7 PC with primecoin-qt.exe just to see how everything works.

In primecoin-qt.exe I went to the debug console and started mining with setgenerate true.

Unfortunately the console does not show any status messages. I see that it's mining because of 100% CPU Usage.

How do I see any progress being made? I've looked into the debug file, but it's all cryptic.

How do I know that I've solved a new block (I know I would need a lot of luck)?

One strange thing - when I type dumpprivkey $receiving_address into the console I get an invalid address message (code -5).

[atariguy]

getmininginfo will show you that it's working. That's about all you get.
And when you do find a block (it will show up as immature on the main window for a few days before it gets enough confirmations), listtransactions will give you the status of the block as it matures.

Good luck. Aug. 9 - 11, I found 2 blocks each on 2 PCs. Since then, there has been nothing. I was either very lucky, or something changed last week.

[mhps]

Mining solo with the qt wallet is a random waiting game. You can't see progress other than the time you have spent mining, knowing that statistically you will get  a block after a while. If your miner clocks 0.4 chain/day (getmininginfo), you will probably get a block per week. If you can't stand the wait, use ypool.

[Sharky444]

0.4 chain/day seems like a lot!? My 3GHz Core i7 has a value of 0.07 chain/day.

[mhps]

I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing. What I was referring to was what you find in the "chainsperday" line in the output of getmininginfo command typed into the debug console of primecoin-qt. my i5 PC gives 0.43.

[Sharky444]

Yes, it was the same thing we were talking about.

I've replaced the default Primecoin Client (available from download section of primecoin.org) with the optimized hp9 version and chainsperday went from 0.07 to 0.49. The default client is a piece of shit.

[atariguy]

I get 1.14 chainsperday on my best PC, and I've still gotten nothing in the last week.

I thought I'd try the Azure free trial, and it's sadly only getting 1.07. Their "Extra Large" 8 core VM is not quite as good as my PC with an i7 3770K.

[mhps]

My i5 PC hasn't found anything for a week either.

[atariguy]

I switched the servers in my Azure account over to Ypool. I'll see if it would pay for itself by the time my free trial is over. It's looking a bit doubtful so far...