Have been mining for hours with multiple m4.large instances on AWS and still have a zero balance. Is this normal?
What is your Sol/s rate? Divide it by the network hashrate (currently over 500k) and then you can work out your probability of mining a block solo (clue: it’s not very high and falling)
Are you using zcashd? If so just start in non-daemon mode and add -showmetrics (or just add showmetrics=1 in your conf file)
i.e. start with ./src/zcashd -showmetrics and all will be revealed 
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@garethtdavies thanks! Getting 0.0387 which is very low and using an m4.large instance. How can I increase it?
I’m getting 6.8 sol/sec on a c3.2xlarge right now…the total network hashpower is so high that getting a block reward with by like winning the lottery, especially with the ridiculous prices ZEC is going for on the exchanges right now!
@anon47418038 Does having a more expensive instance (like c3.2xlarge) help? This guide says not: https://github.com/Austin-Williams/zcash-guides/wiki/Guide-to-Mining-Zcash-on-Amazon-EC2
You can choose any instance types you want when setting up your spot instances – so long as you have enough RAM to solve Equihash with the dev’s chosen parameters (~ 1 GB). Remember, the bottleneck isn’t memory, it’s memory bandwidth.
Choosing an instance type with a lot of RAM, like an r3.8xlarge, is a waste of money. More memory won’t help you mine more coins. Having more instances running will.
All costs being equal, it would be better to have 2 m3.large instances than 1 r3.large instance. While both configurations have the same amount of (total) memory, the former has higher memory bandwidth.
Use -equihashsolver=tromp which will improve at least 10 fold but your chances of solo mining a block are very very low. Mining on AWS simply isn’t going to be worth it I’m afraid unless you get really lucky.
I’d suggest if mining you do so pooled.
More ram doesn’t help, but you need to look at the cost per core…I need to run the numbers to find the sweet spot before I launch very many instances…I know that sols/sec doesn’t keep going up linearly as you add cores to the same machine.
@garethtdavies Thanks for telling me to use tromp. Does genproclimit make a difference? If so, what should it be set to?
nevermind I got the answer
If you set it to -1 it will mine on all cores
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And for mining on the pool what’s the best hardware to buy?
I thought RAM was important.
RAM isn’t such a big deal, you don’t need even 2 gigs, and using more than 4 CPU cores on a machine is pointless, as the algo doesn’t scale with more cores because of cache misses.
Hi there,
I briefly launched an M4.xlarge in the morning, but honestly, my laptop is faster so I dropped it as fast as launched.
Good luck to you all
Yeah, until there is a stable NVIDIA miner to use that’s compatible with the P* instances at Amazon, mining on AWS with CPU mining doesn’t make economic sense due to the total network hashpower. However, you can run a fullnode wallet in the free tier!
I’m running the nicehash nheqminer on a free tier instance.
0.0866667 H/s, 0.213333 Sol/s
lol! pretty sure its making me nothing at all but hey it runs…
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yeah I first tried on a free tier, it found shares, so you can actually make money out of it with nicehash.