Since January, public masternode testing on the Matrix AI Network have gone underway. Since then, the Matrix community wasted no time in testing and benchmarking their hardware to see if their system’s performance can keep up with the and validating demands of the network.
Like the rest of the community, I too was able to set up a masternode on the network. Today I will share my experiences on the process, results, and my opinions.
Before I go any further, here is are the general requirements one must meet in order to run a masternode:
Masternode requirements
- Must posses 10,000 MAN tokens
- Must have hardware (Recommended is 6-core 2.9 Ghz CPU)
Verification Masternode requirements
- Must posses 100,000 MAN tokens
- Must have hardware capable of processing 1000 transactions per second on the Matrix system. (6-core 2.9 Ghz CPU is said to be the minimum. My personal recommendation is 8-core CPU 2.9 Ghz or above).
My Experience:
The first couple times I set up the node, I started with 30,000 MAN for the masternode. At first, I was quite delighted to see rewards being deposited to my testnet . One thing that had me confused however was the fact that I couldn’t see my node in the miner distribution chart. What was the reason for this? Some miners that were in the distribution chart were even using weaker hardware than I. With this in mind, I took to a Matrix team member to seek out some answers. With some help, I found some issues with my node
The first issue encountered was that my node wouldn’t sync to the latest block. For some odd reason, the node would freeze on a block all while the would keep increasing in blocks. For example my node would just freeze on block 34964 while the blocks keep increasing. Despite this issue, my node continued to receive some rewards sometimes. What confused me, again, was that my address didn’t show up in the miner distribution chart.
How I attempted to fix this…
To make sure there was an underlying issue, I uninstalled and re installed the node and repeated the set up process about 5 times. To no surprise, I realized that something wasn’t right (shocking). The first issue I found was entering the “— syncmode” incorrectly. There was a space before syncmode separating it from the two dashes. After fixing it I launched the node again, but to no avail, it had the same issue. As per tradition, I repeated the node set up process 5 times, the same issue persisted.
After all this effort, I uninstalled everything and re installed it again and repeated the process. to my excitement it did sync, but after a few minutes it fell behind again. At this point I was able to send my logs etc to the Matrix dev team, to my surprise, I was informed that there was a bug in the node setup that I mistakenly uncovered. This bug was somehow related to Window’s fast start up option. After this find, I was advised to disabled this option in the control panel. Again, I uninstalled and reinstalled everything and repeated the node set up process. This time syncing took quite a long time, interestingly enough, it never froze. Finally after everything synced etc, I was able to begin the process. This was the first time I was able to see my address in the distribution chart.
The results of my node?
I saw that my miner went up and down the distribution chart in regards to hasrate. At one point my miner had over 40% of the total hash rate from the chart. In the end I was able to get over 3500 MAN over the course of around three days. As of now I decided to give my hardware a rest.
Last Thoughts
Overall I am pleased with everything the team has done so far. I would definitely like to seem some extra features for when masternodes full launch however. An easier set up process would be great, a better user interface, and added features that allow users to check on node status, rewards, and even one click node deployment would be great.
Published at Wed, 06 Feb 2019 08:00:16 +0000
