What is the difference between mining with multiple workers vs single?

Question

Some bitcoin mining clients mine on a single worker, while other clients allow multiple workers. How will either of these options affect mining production?

Answer 1

Depends. Generally you'd use multiple workers when you have multiple machines (ie graphics cards, mining rigs, or a farm of USB sticks). In some cases you could have them all combined and contributing to a single worker but usually this is not desirable because you'd want to keep track of how each device is performing.

If for no other reason, that certainly makes it easier to tell which one has crashed or is not working when problems arise.

Some hardware&software combinations might produce slightly more from running on two workers at once but in most cases I think that's unlikely.

Answer 2

Bitcoin is generating using your hardware, thus if you have 1 worker on a 5 GHS piece of hardware, then your single worker runs at 5 GHS. If you add yet another worker , your'e complicating the issue for no real good reason. The two workers have to share the 5 GHS resources and each worker will perform at Approximately 2.5 GHS.

If you add 100 workers then none of your workers will perform properly.

I would recommend using one worker per hardware unit.

Answer 3

I am using 4 BITMAIN Antminer U2, on a usb hub plugged into one usb port on my pc. Do I put 4 workers into one config file or do I make multiple config files?

I was using just one worker for all 4 of the antminer's but I am trying to make 4 workers for the 4 miners. Here is my example below:

{
"pools" : [
    {
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://us-east.stratum.slushpool.com:3333",
        "user" : "INAP.slave",
        "pass" : "japruitt$100k",
        "pool-priority" : "0"
    },
    {
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://us-east.stratum.slushpool.com:3333",
        "user" : "INAP.worker1",
        "pass" : "japruitt$100k",
        "pool-priority" : "0"
    },
    {
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://us-east.stratum.slushpool.com:3333",
        "user" : "INAP.slave34",
        "pass" : "japruitt$100k",
        "pool-priority" : "0"
    },
    {
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://us-east.stratum.slushpool.com:3333",
        "user" : "INAP.slave69",
        "pass" : "japruitt$100k",
        "pool-priority" : "0"
    }
]
,
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"expiry-lp" : "3600",
"failover-switch-delay" : "300",
"log" : "20",
"no-pool-disable" : true,
"no-client-reconnect" : true,
"no-show-processors" : true,
"no-show-procs" : true,
"no-unicode" : true,
"queue" : "1",
"quiet-work-updates" : true,
"quiet-work-update" : true,
"scan-time" : "60",
"skip-security-checks" : "0",
"submit-stale" : true,
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",
"shares" : 0,
"kernel-path" : "C:\\Program Files\\BFGMiner\\/share/bfgminer"
}

Will this tell BfgMiner that there are 4 antminers and will it also place the proper workers with the proper antminers? I am sorry but I posted this exactly how I have it in the config file but this site posted it the way it wants to post the configurations.