What's the proper way to scale p2pool?

Question

At the moment I have ONE linux server acting as the "APP" server for bitcoind/p2pool applications and another linux server with nginx proxying web traffic from the APP server, while behind CloudFlare.

What would be the proper way to scale out p2pool in this scenario? My thoughts were:

1. Create a cloud load balancer for the APP servers
2. Take a server snapshot of my single APP server
3. Spin up 2 more servers from that server snapshot and place them behind the load balancer
4. Update the DNS to point to the floating IP of the load balancer

Is this the proper way to scale up p2pool ?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: There is no "proper" way to do anything :)

Some people think that P2Pool is hard to scale. But it can be scaled easily by dividing it into smaller pools that feed into the main pool.

This is beneficial for a lot of reasons but two important ones that come to mind are hardware restrictions (like what you seem to be getting into) and small miners being unable to revive payouts because of P2Pool's sharechain's difficulty.

This could be done any number of times, in a peer-to-peer way to achieve an acceptable difficulty; and eventually it will have to be done multiple times, if, for example, the P2Pool difficulty is in the petahashes, and people are still mining in the kilohashes

This could also be done with non-peer-to-peer, "standard" pools (and has been done), by having them feed into the P2Pool network.

Answer 2

Good question as I have been searching for this myself.

I think the answer is that no one does it. Most p2pools I've been on show the memory pressure, cpu load, etc of the p2pool that was running. I believe this indicates that only a single box is running. Also, the addresses have shown up as p2pool-1.domain.com, p2pool-2.domain.com, etc.

We all know you can run multiple copies of the wallet, so that's not a big deal.

Answer 3

I would definitely not bother with that and host a second node and keep the single nodes as effective as possible. The upside is you eventually can offer different node locations!!! You still could offer the p2pool under different subdomains, for example "somecountry.somecoin.url.tld"