Adage News & Updates

New design new features

So I have been doing a lot of work on the website recently:

• Site is now integrated with the latest Cardano Haskell Node (v1.5.1), currently running on Testnet
• New dark layout
• New section dedicated to monitoring relays health
• Even faster websocket updates of key metrics

I hope this website will become one of the best Cardano stakepool websites. But to achieve this goal I need to develop more features that are targeted delegators. I have started this work, but realized it might be better to wait until the Cardano Haskell software offers more features. Bookmark this page and come back when Shelley Mainnet launches!

Latest Jormungandr

A lot of of ADA is currently delegated to the pool, and it now produces blocks on a daily basis. 2xYay! With 10.8M ADA delegated the pool is far from saturated, and I am still hoping more will join, so that daily block production is not so reliant on one big delegator.

I always try to run the latest Jormungandr version (currently v0.8.13). Upgrading always requires in a little downtime while installing the new version, bootstapping, and getting new peers. The downtime can be planned ahead of time as there are always gaps in the 24h schedule. So up- and downgrades does not cause issues for block production.

The latest version of Jormungandr is performing a lot better than previous versions in terms of CPU usage and memory. However there are still some issues with lag. I am sure that is the reason why a lot of operators are still running the older v0.8.9 version of Jormungadr. I have personally been going back and forth between the two versions a few times, but my final conclusion is that v0.8.13 is performing better on my server.

The occasional 1-2 block lag means that I have to pay extra attention when the pool is scheduled to produce blocks. It also means more frequent Jormungadr restarts than I would like. In order to reduce downtime I have setup a passive node that my pool can bootstrap off. The reduces the risk of missing blocks due to lag caused by networking issues or low quality peers.

A great interview with Charles Hoskinson

Ryan Selkis aka TwoBitIdiot has made this great interview with Charles Hoskinson. If you havn't seen it I suggest you check it out:

First block created!

After 39 epochs my pool finally managed to create it's first block. Happy to see that the leader logs on the website updated the way I expected. I am also kind of happy that I got to keep most of the rewards for myself :-)

A few facts about the very first block:

• Total rewards: 1,143.9 ADA
• Distributed to delegators: 1,103.7 ADA
• Total tax: 40.2 ADA
• The block was created with only 45k ADA delegated to the pool!
• Current ROI calculated by Pooltool: 926.7% :-)
• Block on block explorer

Few people want to delegate to a pool that hasn't created any blocks, so that is another reason I'm happy about making this block.

Happy New Year!

2019 was a nice epoch and we finally got Shelley! Today I am taking the beta notice off the page, as both the pool and the web-site are now running smooth.

The only thing that is missing is that my pool needs to create blocks. This week some kind soul delegated 200k to my pool, so it now controls 250k in total. With this amount my pool should be able to produce at least one block in 5-10 days. Of course I am hoping that more stakers will join. There are quite a few pools, that are already saturated. Hopefully stakers will realize this and move to unsaturated pools such as mine.

The "Stake Pool Bootstrap Channel" on Telegram is a nice initiative and I have joined in. I am pretty far down the list and it will be interesting to see if it will keep running until it becomes my turn to benefit (in about 50 days from today). For this epoch and the next we are delegating to the pool "ADA Inground Staking Pool" with the ticker EARTH.

Even though I am pretty happy with the site now, I will continue to make updates in the new year. For example it would be nice with a "getting started" section. Also I still need to improve the site for mobile devices. The latest updates on the site:

• It is now possible to see epoch progression
• Fixed the number for total controlled stake
• A few other small updates
• Site out of Beta :-)

Pool is running stable

I am very pleased to say that Jormungandr has been running for over 50 hours without requiring a restart! My pool would have run for even longer if all the trusted peers from IOHK had not gone down on the 24^th. I am not exactly sure what happened on the 24^th, but naturally the network suffered when no pools could bootstrap from the trusted peers. I have prepared my own pool to run as a trusted peer if we run into similar issues again.

On the top right of the page you can see how long Jormungandr has been running since last restart. Restarts are required whenever Jormungandr is upgraded or when configuration changes.

Jormungandr v0.8.5 upgrade

The pool has upgraded to Jormungandr v0.8.5 and so far it has been running for 12 hours without issues.

I now send my latest block to pooltool.io that currently tracks the latest block from 68 different pools in total. Great idea!

Jormungandr v0.8.5-alpha3 upgrade

The hard working IOHK dev's have released new alpha version of Jormungandr (v0.8.5-alpha3) this sunday. I have taken it for a spin and everything has been running smooth for +8 hours. No errors with trace log from Jormungandr so far :-)

Jormungandr v0.8.5-alpha1 experimentation

I have been doing a little experimentation with settings on the latest Jormungandr v0.8.5-alpha1. Basically I have put the SQLite files for the blockchain on a RAM disk and changed some Jormungandr settings + network settings in Linux. So far my pool has been running for 8 hours straight without any hiccups (except for a non-fatal error in Jormungandr).

This is a big improvement from before, where I had to restart Jormungandr every 30 minutes or so because it was stuck. I am pretty sure that my regular hard drive hasn’t been a bottleneck, so I will most likely go back to storing the blockchain on a regular SSD. But before I do that, I want to see how long it can run for this time. Yay!

Happy holidays!

I finally have a little free time to work on the pool site. A few things on the todo-list:

• Add news section
• Add About page
• Fix some links
• Make the site more mobile friendly
• Improve deployment scripts
• Clear out the old leader logs from way back when we were at v0.8.2-rc2

I wish everyone who is contributing to the Cardano project a merry x-mas. Special thanks to the “Stake Pool Best Practice Workgroup” on Telegram.