What would be the Internet Usage For 100 Antminer S7?

Question

I am planing to set up a mini farm with 100 S7 Miners, but am little concerned about the internet usage and speed. What speed do I need and how much bandwidth it will consume per month?

Answer 1

Mining in a pool setting actually doesn't require all that much bandwidth. This is because you get block templates sent to you and that single template can be used by all 100 miners. A block template isn't very big, it's less than 1k and looks something like this:

{
 "error": null,
 "result": {
   "coinbasetxn": {
     "data": "0100000001000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000ffffffff1302955d0f00456c6967697573005047dc66085fffffffff02fff1052a01
0000001976a9144ebeb1cd26d6227635828d60d3e0ed7d0da248fb88ac01000000000000001976
a9147c866aee1fa2f3b3d5effad576df3dbf1f07475588ac00000000"
   },
   "previousblockhash": "000000004d424dec1c660a68456b8271d09628a80cc62583e5904f5894a2483c",
   "transactions": [],
   "expires": 120,
   "target": "00000000ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff",
   "longpollid": "some gibberish",
   "height": 23957,
   "version": 2,
   "curtime": 1346886758,
   "mutable": ["coinbase/append"],
   "bits": "ffff001d"
 },
 "id": 0
}

You'll get that maybe once every few seconds, so from a downloading perspective, you only need about 20k/min download and that's sufficient to keep all your miners busy.

For upload, you'll need to submit shares to the pool. Depending on the pool, each share has to be below a certain target and the share targets are adjusted normally so that it doesn't take up much upload bandwidth. The actual upload for each share is on par with a get-block-template call. In addition, if you're using stratum, there's very little overhead in terms of requests since the same connection is used for both uploading and downloading (unlike http which incurs a large overhead).

Depending on the pool and the policies they have, though I'd guess that they normalize to reduce the number of shares submitted to be less than 100k/min. Again, depends on the pool and what shares they accept. But basically, the network bandwidth should not be the limiting factor even with a normal home internet connection.