Mining Guide
Want to start mining on Arweave? You've come to the right place! Get set up with this quick and easy guide, and join our awesome network of ever-growing miners.
For any questions and support queries regarding mining on Arweave, we strongly recommend that you join our Discord server as this is the hub of our mining and developer communities. Here you will find plenty of community members and Arweave team members available to help you out 🤖
Arweave core developers have been made aware that at least one mining node inside the Chinese mainland has been seized by the government. Node operators should understand that the Arweave network stores and serves a significant amount of material related to the activities of the Chinese government. The Arweave protocol does not require that any miner to store data that they deem inappropriate. You can read more about our content policies here.
Extract the contents of the archive. It's recommended to unpack it inside a dedicated directory. You can always move this directory around, but the miner may not work if you move only some of the files. The weave data would, by default, be stored in this directory as well, but we recommend to override it using the
data_dir command-line argument.If your OS/platform architecture is not in the list, check the source code repository README for how to build the miner from source.
It is also possible to set-up an Arweave mining environment on Windows using the ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’ or a virtual machine environment.
The number of available file descriptors affects the rate at which your node can process data. As the default limit assigned to user processes on most operating systems is usually low, we recommend increasing it.
You can check the current limit by executing
ulimit -n.On Linux, to set a bigger global limit, open
/etc/sysctl.conf and add the following line:fs.file-max=100000000
Execute
sysctl -p to make the changes take effect.You may also need to set a proper limit for the particular user. To set a user-level limit, open
/etc/security/limits.conf and add the following line:<your OS user> soft nofile 10000000
Open a new terminal session. To make sure the changes took effect, and the limit was increased, type
ulimit -n. You can also change the limit for the current session via ulimit -n 10000000If the above does not work, set
DefaultLimitNOFILE=10000000
in both
/etc/systemd/user.confand /etc/systemd/system.confNow you’re ready to start the mining process by using the following command from the Arweave directory:
Note:
In order to protect your machine from material that may be illegal in your country, you should use a content policy when mining Arweave. Content policies can be generated using the Shepherd tool. Shepherd allows you to create your own content policies for the content that you would like to store on your Arweave node, abiding by your moral and legal requirements.
In order to help you get started quickly, @ArweaveTeam provides an NSFW content filter which you can load by adding the following to your Arweave start command:
transaction_blacklist_url http://shepherd-v.com/nsfw.txt./bin/start mine mining_addr YOUR-MINING-ADDRESS peer 188.166.200.45 peer 188.166.192.169 peer 163.47.11.64 peer 139.59.51.59 peer 138.197.232.192
Please replace YOUR-MINING-ADDRESS with the address of the wallet you would like to credit when you find a block!
If you would like to see a log of your miner’s activity, you can run
./bin/logs -f in the Arweave directory in a different terminal.The mining console should eventually look like this:
[Stage 1/3] Starting to hash
Miner spora rate: 1545 h/s, recall bytes computed/s: 3129, MiB/s read: 386, the round lasted 145 seconds.
[Stage 1/3] Starting to hash
Skipping hashrate report, the round lasted less than 10 seconds.
[Stage 1/3] Starting to hash
Miner spora rate: 1545 h/s, recall bytes computed/s: 3182, MiB/s read: 386, the round lasted 135 seconds.
[Stage 1/3] Starting to hash
Miner spora rate: 1637 h/s, recall bytes computed/s: 3292, MiB/s read: 409, the round lasted 245 seconds.
[Stage 1/3] Starting to hash
When you mine a block, the console shows:
[Stage 2/3] Produced candidate block ... and dispatched to network.
Approximately 20 minutes later, you should see
[Stage 3/3] Your block ... was accepted by the network
Note that occasionally your block won't be confirmed (the chain chooses a different fork).
To stop the miner, run
./bin/stop or kill the OS process (kill -sigterm <pid> or pkill <name>). Sending a SIGKILL (kill -9) is not recommended.The three crucial factors determining your miner's efficiency are disk throughput (GiB/s), the amount of synchronized data, and processor power. We recommend that you have 32 GiB of RAM, while the minimum requirement is 8 GiB.
The node reports its hashrate in the console -
Miner spora rate: 1546 h/sand logs -miner_sporas_per_second. Note that it is 0 when you start the miner without data and slowly increases as more data is synchronized. After the number stabilizes, you can input it into the mining calculator generously created by the community member @tiamat here to see the expected return.To estimate the hashrate in advance, you would need to know or measure your CPU's performance, the disk throughput, and the amount of disk space you will allocate for mining.
To benchmark CPU, you can run the packaged
randomx-benchmark script../bin/randomx-benchmark --mine --init 32 --threads 32 --jit --largePages. Replace 32 with the number of CPU threads. Note that reducing the number of threads might improve the outcome. Do not specify --largePages if you have not configured them yet. For the reference, a 32-threads AMD Ryzen 3950x can do about 10000 h/s, a 32-threads AMD EPYC 7502P - 24000 h/s, a 12-threads Intel Xeon E-2276G CPU - 2500 h/s, a 2-threads Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650 machine in the cloud - 600 h/s.If you do not know the throughput of your disk, run
hdparm -t /dev/sda. Replace /dev/sda with the disk name from df -h. To be competitive, consider a fast NVMe SSD capable of several GiB per second and more.Finally, to see the upper hashrate limit of a setup, run
./bin/hashrate-upper-limit 2500 1 3 where 2500 is a RandomX hashrate, 1 is the number of GiB a disk reads per second, 3 is 1/replicated share of the weave. For example, a 12-core Intel Xeon with a 1 GiB/s SSD with a third of the weave is capped at 540 h/s. In practice, the performance is usually about 0.7 - 0.9 of the upper limit.We made our best effort to choose reasonable defaults; however, changing some of the following parameters may improve the efficiency of your miner:
stage_one_hashing_threads (between 1 and the number of CPU threads), stage_two_hashing_threads , io_threads, randomx_bulk_hashing_iterations. For example,./bin/start stage_one_hashing_threads 32 stage_two_hashing_threads 32 io_threads 50 randomx_bulk_hashing_iterations 64 data_dir /your/dir mine sync_jobs 80 mining_addr YOUR-MINING-ADDRESS peer 188.166.200.45 peer 188.166.192.169 peer 163.47.11.64 peer 139.59.51.59 peer 138.197.232.192
recall bytes computed/s should be roughly equal to Miner spora rate divided by your share of the weave. If it is not, consider increasing io_threads and decreasingstage_one_hashing_threads. You can learn the share of the weave the node has synced to date by dividing the size of the chunk_storage folder (du -sh /path/to/data/dir/chunk_storage) by the total weave size. Increasing randomx_bulk_hashing_iterations to 128 or bigger might make a big difference on the powerful machine.The Arweave miner does not mine without data. For every new block, in order to mine it, numerous random chunks of the past data need to be read and checked. It takes time to download data from the peers, so do not expect mining to be very intensive after the first launch. For example, if you have 10% of the total weave size, you are mining at 10% efficiency of a similar setup with the entire dataset. Note that it is not required to download the complete dataset. If you only have 1 TiB of space for the
chunk_storage and rocksdb folders, the node will fill it up, and your miner may nevertheless be competitive, assuming the disk and the processor are sufficiently performant.To speed up bootstrapping, use a higher (default is 20) value for the
sync_jobs configuration parameter like this:./bin/start mine sync_jobs 80 mining_addr YOUR-MINING-ADDRESS peer 188.166.200.45 peer 188.166.192.169 peer 163.47.11.64 peer 139.59.51.59 peer 138.197.232.192
You can set the sync_jobs back to 2 after historical data is synced. Turn the miner off (do not set the
mine flag) to further speed up syncing.To get an additional performance boost, consider configuring huge memory pages in your OS.
On Ubuntu, to see the current values, execute:
cat /proc/meminfo | grep HugePages. To set a value, run sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=1000. To make the configuration survive reboots, create /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf and put vm.nr_hugepages=1000 there.The output of
cat /proc/meminfo | grep HugePages should then look like this:
AnonHugePages: 0 kB
ShmemHugePages: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 1000 HugePages_Free: 1000 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0If it does not or if there is a "erl_drv_rwlock_destroy" error on startup, reboot the machine.
Finally, tell the miner it can use large pages by specifying
enable randomx_large_pageson startup:./bin/start mine enable randomx_large_pages mining_addr YOUR-MINING-ADDRESS peer 188.166.200.45 peer 188.166.192.169 peer 163.47.11.64 peer 139.59.51.59 peer 138.197.232.192
The simplest approach is to store everything on a single disk. Skip this section if you are fine with that. However, you may store metadata that is not used in mining on a cheaper and slower medium, e.g., an HDD disk.
Mount the fast devices to the
chunk_storage and rocksdb folders:sudo mount /dev/nvme1n1 /your/dir/chunk_storage
sudo mount /dev/nvme1n2 /your/dir/rocksdb
sudo mount /dev/hdd1 /your/dir
The output of
df -h should look like:/dev/hdd1 5720650792 344328088 5087947920 7% /your/dir /dev/nvme1n1 104857600 2097152 102760448 2% /your/dir/chunk_storage /dev/nvme1n2 104857600 2097152 102760448 2% /your/dir/rocksdbReplace /dev/nvme1n1, /dev/nvme1n2, /dev/hdd1 with the filesystems you have, replace
/your/dir with the directory you specify on startup:./bin/start data_dir /your/dir mine sync_jobs 80 mining_addr YOUR-MINING-ADDRESS peer 188.166.200.45 peer 188.166.192.169 peer 163.47.11.64 peer 139.59.51.59 peer 138.197.232.192
An important part of the mining process is discovering blocks mined by other miners. Your node needs to be accessible from anywhere on the Internet so that your peers can connect with you and share their blocks.
To check if your node is publicly accessible, browse to
http://[Your Internet IP]:1984. You can obtain your public IP here, or by running curl ifconfig.me/ip. If you specified a different port when starting the miner, replace "1984" anywhere in these instructions with your port. If you can not access the node, you need to set up TCP port forwarding for incoming HTTP requests to your Internet IP address on port 1984 to the selected port on your mining machine. For more details on how to set up port forwarding, consult your ISP or cloud provider.If the node is not accessible on the Internet, the miner functions but is significantly less efficient.
If you want to bootstrap another miner on a different machine, you can copy the downloaded data over from the first miner to bring it up to speed faster. Please follow these steps:
- 1.Stop the first Arweave miner, and ensure the second miner is also not running.
- 2.Copy the entire
data_dirfolder to the new machine. Note that thechunk_storagefolder contains sparse files, so copying them the usual way will take a lot of time and the size of the destination folder will be too large. To copy this folder, use rsync with the-aSflags or archive it viatar -Scfbefore copying. - 3.Start both miners.
We do not recommend using Windows for mining because according to our experience it is less efficient and reliable. Nevertheless, mining on Windows is possible.
You can run an Arweave miner inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Note that the default TCP configuration WSL relies on is more restrictive than a typical Linux configuration. The WSL configuration offers about half as many TCP ports for making TCP connections and twice as long socket re-use timeout, what significantly reduces the number of simultaneous requests per second the miner can make to other nodes.
As a result, you may see the following errors in the miner console:
=ERROR REPORT====...=== Socket connection error: exit badarg, [{gen_tcp,connect,4, [{file,"gen_tcp.erl"},{line,149}]}Windows Event Log is expected to have the following warning:
TCP/IP failed to establish an outgoing connection because the selected local endpoint was recently used to connect to the same remote endpoint. This error typically occurs when outgoing connections are opened and closed at a high rate, causing all available local ports to be used and forcing TCP/IP to reuse a local port for an outgoing connection. To minimize the risk of data corruption, the TCP/IP standard requires a minimum time period to elapse between successive connections from a given local endpoint to a given remote endpoint.Once you are successfully mining on the Arweave, you will need to stay up to date with new releases. Join our mailing list to receive emails informing you that a new update has been released, along with the steps you need to take to stay up to speed - particularly updates that require you to perform an action within a certain time period in order to stay in sync with the network. Keep an eye out for these messages, and if possible make sure that you add [email protected] to your email provider’s trusted senders list!
Last modified 3mo ago