FAQ's: Worker Management

If you use multiple mining devices at a time, it is practical to have a detailed overview of each device. We offer a sophisticated solution in the form of user-friendly worker management. You can easily monitor and manage your miners in the Workers section. Our system is designed to handle even large farms with thousands of workers.

Worker creation

Once you connect a miner with its worker name configured, the name will automatically appear in the device overview as a new worker.

If you do not set a worker name in your device configuration, a new one will be automatically created with a name [auto] worker and your hash rate will be assigned to it.

Worker settings

The following settings are available for each worker:

Enable monitoring – The monitoring system will detect and report any hash rate issues related to the selected worker. Monitoring helps you supervise how your miners work over time and minimizes losses caused by connection issues or mining hardware/software failures. To find out more about the monitoring feature, read the monitoring manual section.

Auto detect alert limit – Automatically estimates the hash rate of your worker by its past activity. If you untick this, you can set your own Alert Limit. The system will report issues when hash rate drops below this value.

Use default minimum difficulty – The pool uses the VarDiff algorithm which automatically calculates the optimal difficulty for your device. If you untick this, it is possible to set the minimum provided difficulty manually, however we do not recommend this option unless you have knowledge of the technical background.

Labels – It is possible to create labels and assign them to the workers according to your own needs. You can create and delete your labels by clicking Manage Labels and +. There could be a shortcut, name, color and further description in every label detail. Assign labels by clicking Edit Worker > Labels > selected label > Apply.

Other options

Filter your workers – To have a better overview of your workers, you can filter them by their state, name, hash rate, minimum difficulty, alert limit or actual state.

Worker detail – If you open the worker detail by clicking on its name, the parameters of a miner and the settings will be shown. There is also a Recent Hash Rate graph displayed in the bottom section which can be very helpful for troubleshooting.

Workers are created automatically when the hash rate gets connected and there is no need to create them manually. Once you connect a miner with its worker name configured, the name will automatically appear in the device overview as a new worker. If you do not set a worker name in your device configuration, a new one will be automatically created with a name [auto] worker and your hash rate will be assigned to it.

Find instructions to how to connect your workers to the pool in Step 3 of the following articles: Bitcoin Mining Setup on Braiins Pool

Worker names are also case sensitive. For example, mining connections to workerName ABC, abc, and Abc are now treated as three independent workers. Just to remind you, a valid workerName (mirrored to pool workers) must match the following regular expression of characters ^[-a-zA-Z0-9_@+:]+$.

If workerName is not provided at all or doesn’t match the regexp, the hash rate is accounted to the automatic worker called [auto]. How to delete or re-enable a worker? Follow FAQ’s for Worker Management.

Names can be arbitrary alphanumeric strings or something more personalized — it’s entirely up to you.

A valid workerName must match the following regular expression ^[-a-zA-Z0-9_@+:]+$ (i.e. don’t use character types that are not listed). If a workerName is not provided at all or doesn’t match the regexp, the hash rate is accounted to the automatic worker called [auto].

You can use more miners with the same worker credentials. However, we recommend that you connect each mining device to a separate workerName for efficient monitoring.

As for the password field, you can ignore it completely. It is a legacy Stratum protocol parameter that has no use nowadays.

This value is used as a hashrate limit for checking whether your device works properly. If the effective hash rate of a worker is greater than or equal the to Alert Limit, everything is perfect and you will not receive any monitoring alert reports.

However, sometimes it can happen that the effective hash rate drops below the Alert Limit. If your monitoring is enabled you will be notified by an email and you can start acting accordingly. Such behavior is mainly caused by the following reasons:

How to set the alert limit

Miner is your physical mining device. Usually, it is a specialized ASIC miner (device with just one purpose to mine cryptocurrencies) or a PC with powerful GPU sufficient for mining. There are different types of mining hardware for each cryptocurrency depending on its mining algorithm.

Worker is a name for your mining device that you use as a login for your mining software. We recommend giving a designated worker name to every mining device. That way you can track down a faulty miner easily just by looking at the monitoring section of your profile page.

You can also run all of your miners under a single worker name and everything will be just fine. The downside of this approach is that if one of your miners does not work correctly, you will see a drop in your hash rate but you will not be able to determine which device is not running optimally.

Make sure you have a look at how shares are being produced in section Braiins Pool FAQ’s - What is a Share in proof of work.

There are big differences in hashing power of different miners. To optimize network traffic between your miners and the pool we have introduced the variable difficulty algorithm (or vardiff). It assigns more difficult tasks to stronger miners (higher difficulty) and easier tasks to weaker miners so that an average communication frequency is roughly the same for all miners.

Vardiff assigns a quantity of work to each miner such that it should send results back to the pool roughly 12 times per minute. Why 12 times? According to our measurements, this is the ideal frequency that allows a balanced data load to our servers and correct measurements of your miner’s hash rate.

If your miner is too fast, Vardiff increases the difficulty for its work. When too slow, the difficulty decreases.

For example, a difficulty of 20 means that you will find 20 times less hashes satisfying the requirement, but you will be given 20 shares per submission. Hence you will not lose any shares and the network does not get jammed.

Even with a working miner, you can receive alerts if you set the minimum difficulty for a worker to a significantly higher value than recommended because its communication frequency with the pool will not be optimal. It will lead to high variance of its hash rate (wide range of values in different time periods).

Higher hash rate variance makes proper monitoring more difficult and can lead to false monitoring alarms (you can be notified about some event even when the worker is working correctly).

We recommend to either allow vardiff algorithm to select the difficulty for your worker automatically or set the minimum difficulty provided by the vendor of your device on your own.

When you choose to delete an inactive Worker, it gets marked as deleted in our system and hidden from the interface.

If you establish a new connection to said workerName in the future, the system will technically re-enable the previously deleted Worker with all of its configuration such as labels and minimum difficulty.