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I was wondering if I'm mining Monero with CPU, will I/O speed or swap space effect my mining speed (hash rate)?

For example, if I installed Arch Linux on SSD with 50 GiB swap space will the CPU mining got better performance (hashrate) compare to CPU mining on Windows 10 on SSD due to Arch Linux's lightweight?

So which will effect the hashrate (excluding CPUs)? RAM? Swap space? Lightweight OS? I/O speed?

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Your miner will ask the daemon for the next block blob and start hashing it until it finds a result that satisfies the difficulty.

In that process, only the daemon preparing the blob may use some hard drive and/or swap space.

But the mining process in itself is just a repeated computation that uses the CPU/GPU - your speed will mostly depend on the type of CPU/GPU, on the drivers and on the miner's configuration.

So improving I/O and/or swap space is unlikely to make any significant improvement, everything else being equal.

As to the Linux vs. Windows performance, it depends on your hardware, the distribution and the drivers you use. For CPU mining, I've sometimes noticed that Linux is marginally faster but for GPU mining Windows tends to fare better because of better GPU drivers.

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  • Then will mining process do a lot of I/O process, I mean if you're computing will you need to temporarily save the data then send back to the server to see if it satisfies the difficulties? Or it doesn't require much I/O process, the verification of the satisfaction of the difficulties is done in CPU and only final result will send back to the drive and to the pool? – Andrew.Wolphoe Feb 14 '18 at 17:53
  • @Munucial It will require I/O in the sense that the miner needs to communicate with a daemon or a pool through a network (and/or the internet), But it won't access your hard drive. – assylias Feb 14 '18 at 18:23
  • In theory, frequently I/O on USB drive will cause USB drive broke more easily (earlier), so if I'm mining with a Linux on USB drive, the mining process will cause USB drive be more likely to be broken? – Andrew.Wolphoe Feb 14 '18 at 18:26
  • @Munucial The miner won't access you USB drive much (of course you need a drive to store the program): once it's running, it will only use a bit of RAM, a bit of bandwidth and a lot of CPU/GPU. – assylias Feb 15 '18 at 10:07

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