suggestion: plot manager

[Bluebrain2000]

This is such a handy, beautiful and well programmed tool!
It would be so great if there was an "add on" (or separate tool) for managing parallel plotting.

[grayfallstown]

Thanks a lot.

I am considering building my own Plot Manager for some time now. Did not commit to it tho.
The possibility is still out there.

[grayfallstown]

What features would you expect?

[dorofino]

What features would you expect?

Indeed what a great tool. Thank you so much for taking the time to build it.

Maybe having a new column showing the plot running time.
Basically, it will be Current Time - Started Time = Running time

Thanks again,
D

[grayfallstown]

Maybe having a new column showing the plot running time.

Will be in the next version

[dorofino]

Excellent, thank you.

[Bluebrain2000]

What features would you expect?

At least for me, the most important thing is somehow "intelligent" start of new plots.
With the Chia GUI Client, after some time, parallel plots get messed up in timing.

I wrote a Plotmanager in Perl. Nothing fancy, but at least my parallel plots don't get messed up any more.
I can setup the number of parallel plots, max. concurrent plots in phase 1, RAM and # of threads to use.

The script then analyses always the last 6 log files and calculated the optimum time when to start the next plot.

a new plot is started..
if running_plots < max_parallel_plots
&&
if running_plots_in_phase1 < max_plots_in_phase1
&&
if age_of_youngest_plot >= calculated_time

This way, new plots are always started automatically and with the perfect timing for running them stagged in parallel with minimal interference between them.
When a plot finished, the calculation through the last log files is done again to adapt to changes.

The data is sent to a webserver every 30 seconds and if something goes wrong (offline, low drive space, too few plots running, stucked plot, ... I get a notification on my smartphone)

As you might have guessed, I'm not used to program Windows GUI apps. I also know what plotting under Linux is 5-10% faster than Windows, but my High End PC runs Windows and that's nothing I can change. For me, Windows is a must have on the desktop and Linux is great on servers and for embedded applications.
Looking at the Chia netspace growth, it's already too late to invest in a new plotting-only machine.
It's realy time for me to learn Python! :)

[grayfallstown]

@Bluebrain2000 Your tool looks interessting. Did you publish it somewhere or can you upload it somewhere and send me the link to [email protected]?
This would give me a head start if and when I actually commit to this project.

[Bluebrain2000]

@Bluebrain2000 Your tool looks interessting. Did you publish it somewhere or can you upload it somewhere and send me the link to [email protected]?
This would give me a head start if and when I actually commit to this project.

No, I didn't publish it.
I'll send you the script by email.

[Bluebrain2000]

@grayfallstown
here you go:
https://github.com/Bluebrain2000/Chia-Plot-Manager

As said, it's not fancy, it's not pretty, Perl is not the ideal solution for Windows, and it's far from complete or perfect.
But if it helps you or others, that would of course still be great. :)

At least for me, this tool works great and my plotting machine works 24/7 fully unattended with maximum efficency.

[revlisoft]

This tool is amazing in what it provides. There are definitely a lot of areas to improve to make it even more impressive. Might I suggest instead of building your own plot manager maybe do tighter integration with something like https://github.com/swar/Swar-Chia-Plot-Manager so you're not reinventing the wheel? Maybe you can create a nice GUI to create/manager the yaml files that would be consumed by swar's plot manager?