Difference Between Hashes vs Solutions?

I have been browsing mining progress for quite some time, but I started my daily browsing months after the forum took off. Many in the community now seem to have a strong knowledge in the basics and even posts directed at the whole community include somewhat confusing terms. I myself have had trouble discerning the difference between hashes per second and solutions per second. Are they the same or are they different, and if so what do they each represent? I would really appreciate an answer.

Thanks

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See Update documentation to refer to a "solution rate" for mining · Issue #1422 · zcash/zcash · GitHub

h/s is somewhat ambiguous, so either use sol/s or use h/s if all parties involved agree it is meant to be equivalent to sol/s.

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But then, when I benchmark for speed I get:

So which one is it? 5h/s or/& 11 S/s? :slight_smile:

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Hi, do you mind telling me what your cpu is?

Thanks

I’m sorry if I misunderstand but isn’t Hashes a static measure of calculations over time, while Solutions include the variance of those hashes performing an operation that results in the solution of an algorithmic puzzle?

It may not really be relevant now, but at vastly higher difficulty wouldn’t sol/s be a worse measurement of performance than hashes/s since it could vary based on luck, akin to ‘mined blocks’ or ‘shares’ being a bad measurement of Bitcoin hash rate when compared to TH/s?

Edit: It seems I may have been wrong. Read @str4d post below.

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Sol/s measures the rate at which Equihash solutions are found. Each one of those solutions is tested against the current target (after adding to the block header and hashing), in the same way that in Bitcoin each nonce variation is tested against the target. That is what we mean by Sol/s === H/s - they are measuring the same thing, and it is the same metric that everyone already uses for other PoW algorithms. Put another way, measuring Sol/s in Zcash is exactly the same as measuring TH/s in Bitcoin (ignoring the “T” scaling factor, which is merely a product of the relative speeds of the PoWs and the relative numbers of miners).

The problem with using H/s is not that the base metric is wrong, but that there are several metrics that could be picked, only one of which is the same as what users expect. In the screenshot above, NiceHash have incorrectly picked the metric “Equihash runs/s” as equivalent to H/s, leading to user confusion (because users will look at that and compare it internally to Bitcoin’s TH/s). By using “Solutions/s”, it is completely unambiguous to both miner developers and pool developers which metric it means, and it ensures that users are getting the “right” metric.

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Ah, so my assumption was wrong. Thank you for the correction.

Hello str4d!,

Thank you very much by clarify this important parameter of metrics.
:slight_smile:

IMHO , mining without Hashing is also very useful and may well be rewarded…