Help! My computer has been stuck creating an identity for 6 days straight!

I have a pc with adequate power (i7-4790, 16gb ram, SSD boot drive, 1060 gpu) running on a static IP. I assigned it to create an identity 6 days ago, it has been stuck at difficulty 35 for the entire 6 days… At this point I’m wondering if I should start the entire process over again or just keep waiting. I’m new so I don’t know if this is normal or not.

You haven’t prayed enough to the RNGesus. Statistics say restarting it will have no effect (on average). It will actually lose a moment that it is actually stopped. On average.

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That’s good, should not take more than a few hours.

Yes you should since you have nothing to lose.

It is normal but rare.

This is true, but I’d restart it anyway :slight_smile:

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I remembered a detail that might help troubleshoot. This is the 2nd time I tried to create an identity. The first time my gpu was under heavy load and it crashed my pc. So I restarted the identity creation through powershell on windows 10 and left it alone for now a week. (Still at 35…) Any chance the pc crashing during the initial identity creation could cause a problem with the entire process? I’m wondering if an OS reinstall is in order.

No, it just makes endless attempts at finding a key that works. If it’s running it’s trying, but you seem to just have bad luck. Not much you can do about that but just wait a little longer.

On a technical level, what is actually happening? Is it solving an algorithm? Because my computer does not seem to be using really any resources while “solving” this equation. From my experience solving problems uses resources. My cpu is basically idle (10% utilization max). I guess I could just have super trash luck but it seems fishy.

Yes, but… a whole week?? I mean, how unlucky can you be?

I use the generated identity as a stress test for computers, the CPU then works 99-100% …
the symptoms on your computer are not normal …

re-download identity.exe to another directory, synchronize the time on your computer with servers on the internet and turn on generating in a separate thread …

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If it takes to long i find stopping and restarting the identity generation seems to increase the odd’s of generating an identity.

i wouldn’t say in 100% sure this is infact the case, but from what testing i have done it does seem to behave like that… no idea why…
it also seems a bit like the longer it runs the higher the difficulty identity it ends up with.

so if i’m generating identities and it takes more than a few hours i usually just restarts it.

best time thus far has been 90 seconds and worst time has been about 48 hours.
but it does also seem like the longer it runs, the longer it takes…
could be related to some sort of caching inside the cpu slowing down the generation.

i really don’t know, but that was the best theory we ended up with, since according to those wise on the subject, the code shouldn’t slow down the generation.

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It doesn’t though… You’re wrong. The code makes independent attempts at finding a key that works. The only thing restarting does is stopping those attempts for a short time.

Ps. If I seems short, we’ve been over this several times. @SGC thinks his hunches trump what the actual code does. And I’m done discussing it. But I will keep correcting misinformation shared with the community.

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No CPU utlization is a big clue that something’s not right.

… or that OP prayed to the RNGesus so little that the CPU saw it was hopeless and switched all the instructions with NOP.

hey … i have very good hunches… most of the time :smiley:
better to be roughly right, than precisely wrong…

seems to work, i duno why… but i do know complex systems can have very weird and nearly unpredictable behaviors, so even if code wasn’t to blame… it could be something else.

a week seems excessive, usually i can generated an identity in 15 minutes to 1 hour.
but sometimes it just runs forever… so i stop it and start it and i generated one in a more usual time…

maybe i’m just superstitious, but then again belief is a powerful force… so maybe my faith in it working makes it so… lol

Not really… Completely wrong information is easy to correct. But correcting your roughly right/wrong answers/hunches/philosophies takes a lot of time and is sometimes quite frustrating (especially when you’re doing it several times over the same topic).
A completely wrong post could be corrected by simply saying: “this is wrong, look here for the correct answer”. But with your roughly right posts you basically have to dissect your lectures and cut out the parts that are right and correct the parts that are wrong. Takes a long time to do so and isn’t fun at all. Roughly right information is way worse than outright wrong information.

Identity generation never took me more than a couple hours. But if the process doesn’t use CPU, it’s obvious that something is wrong.

Yeah, I missed that part, that’s not right. Unless you have many cores I guess. I believe it uses 4 threads by default (May have changed since I last looked), so if you have 16 cores/32 threads it might use only 4 threads, which is about 12%. You can use command line parameters to set the number of threads to use too though. So if you have a monster CPU like that, look at the command line parameters.

You do most of the time! This just isn’t one of them.
And nothing beats precisely right. :wink:

If its taken longer then 30mins for me I think there’s something wrong if its taken 6 days there’s a chance that its no longer running correctly.

Just created an Identity started at 9:40am finished at 10am

the software call the so called threads for workers, adjusting them seems to do something, but adding or removing to them generally only seems to slow down the identity generation process.

you can adjust the identity generation through the arg’s

another weird thing about the identity generation is that it can run in parallel with some tasks and generate identities in roughly the same time, even if the cpu utilization drops by 70% on the identity generation worker used cpu, however other processes running in parallel with the identity generation will slow it down.

which is most likely due to what kind of processing is involved.
not sure if its FPU tasks or whatever else.

me and @deathlessdd ran a few days of testing on identity generation last time we talked about it on the forum.

didn’t really get many firm conclusions out of it aside from it was acting a bit weird once in a while.
and i ended up restarting it if it runs for to long.

This would be the case if you have a quad core CPU. If you have more cores, using them will improve performance. If you don’t the threads will just get in each others way.

Yep I’m gona restart the entire process, day 7 still nothing. Just for good measure im also gona reinstall windows. Its been a couple years since I reinstalled so it wouldn’t hurt. I’d like to start the entire process over again from start to finish on a clean OS and see whats up. Thank you everyone for all the info and feedback! I’ll post up probably tomorrow with results (hopefully)

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Give Debian a go, if you’re reinstalling things anyway :wink:

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you do that and i’m sure it will be done in practically no time :smiley:
do let us know how it goes.