Armadillo ECDSA-113

[WhoCares]

@cjack

There is sth. wrong with my agent.

1. The computing speed is toggling between 591 M/s and 1.4 G/s.
2. And the card name "5070 Ti" should be "4070".
3. My agent becomes #1 of leaderboard.

Maybe collide with another agent?

[cjack]

Originally Posted by WhoCares

@cjack

There is sth. wrong with my agent.

1. The computing speed is toggling between 591 M/s and 1.4 G/s.
2. And the card name "5070 Ti" should be "4070".
3. My agent becomes #1 of leaderboard.

Maybe collide with another agent?

Hey WhoCares, thanks for reporting the speed issue!

The toggling between 591 M/s and 1.4 G/s is actually expected behavior when using --gpu-limit — it's a duty-cycle mechanism (compute burst → sleep → compute burst). The reported speed alternates between instantaneous (high) and averaged (low). Nothing wrong there, that's by design.

However, while investigating this I stumbled onto something bigger: your agent was over-reporting iteration counts by roughly 50× compared to the actual Distinguished Points it produced. All 27 other agents had a perfectly normal DP/iteration ratio (around 100%), while yours was sitting at ~2%.

This caused the dashboard to show inflated progress (135% instead of the real ~91%). We've now corrected the totals and the ETA is accurate again.

Possible cause: are you by any chance running multiple instances of the solver with the same --worker-name? That would explain it — each instance reports its own iteration count to the server, but the DP production doesn't scale proportionally if they're all fighting for the same GPU.

Quick check:

Make sure you have only one solver_fast.exe running per GPU
If you want to use multiple GPUs, use --device N to assign each instance to a different GPU, with different worker names
I've also added a server-side guard (v1.4.2) that validates the DP/iteration ratio per agent, so this kind of inflation can't happen again regardless of the cause.

Thanks for being part of the battle! Your GPU is doing great work.

[WhoCares]

I confirmed there is only one process for solver_fast.exe.

My command is:
solver_fast.exe --server ecdlp.protect.cx --worker-name "WhoCares" --gpu-limit 100 --worker-notes "RTX 4070" --resume

And I have no 5070 Ti card. Only one NVIDIA card.

Shall I remove "--gpu-limit 100"?
I originally set it to 50, but later I got lazy and just changed it to 100 without removing that parameter.

Originally Posted by cjack

Quick check:

Make sure you have only one solver_fast.exe running per GPU
If you want to use multiple GPUs, use --device N to assign each instance to a different GPU, with different worker names
I've also added a server-side guard (v1.4.2) that validates the DP/iteration ratio per agent, so this kind of inflation can't happen again regardless of the cause.

[cjack]

Originally Posted by WhoCares

I confirmed there is only one process for solver_fast.exe.

My command is:
solver_fast.exe --server ecdlp.protect.cx --worker-name "WhoCares" --gpu-limit 100 --worker-notes "RTX 4070" --resume

And I have no 5070 Ti card. Only one NVIDIA card.

Shall I remove "--gpu-limit 100"?
I originally set it to 50, but later I got lazy and just changed it to 100 without removing that parameter.

Thanks for checking! Good news — the issue wasn't on your end at all. We tracked it down to a bug in the solver itself.

The problem: init_worms() used a deterministic hash based only on thread ID. This meant every time an agent reconnected (server restart, network hiccup, etc.), it replayed the exact same random walks from the exact same starting points — producing identical DPs. Since there were several server restarts yesterday, most iterations across ALL agents were duplicated work.

Your --gpu-limit 100 is fine, no need to remove it (100 = no throttling, same as not having the flag).

The fix is in agent v1.4.0 and above — worm initialization now uses a session-unique seed (time ^ PID), so every session and every agent gets different starting points.

Download the new agent directly from the server here:
https://ecdlp.protect.cx/download/ArmadilloSolver.zip

Just replace solver_fast.exe and restart. Your same command line works perfectly.