Critical Bottleneck: Connection Limits Severely Impacting Block Propagation for Mining Pools

[owenashurst]

Given DigiByte’s aggressive 15-second block times, the hard-coded connection limits on the daemon are creating a significant bottleneck for mining pools trying to propagate blocks efficiently.

Despite running at 20-40 TH/s over the past two months, only 99 blocks have been successfully submitted from my operation; the vast majority of mined blocks have become stale. This is not due to network issues on my end — I have optimized connections to the lowest latency peers possible.

The core problem lies in the daemon’s strict connection cap, which drastically restricts peer connectivity and directly hampers block propagation speed. This limitation is causing a substantial increase in stale blocks and is undermining mining efficiency and network performance.

Addressing this bottleneck by increasing peer connection limits or improving network propagation protocols should be a priority to support mining pool stability and the overall health of the DigiByte network.