Stratum Timeout
A Stratum timeout is a broken link between the miner and the pool. The ASIC may keep hashing honestly, but the shares don't arrive, and to the pool the worker is dead.
What a Stratum timeout is
The pool connection is long-lived and rests on constant exchange: the pool sends jobs, the miner returns shares. When the exchange goes silent for a few minutes, both sides consider the link lost. The pool stops crediting, the ASIC tries to reconnect.
The cause is almost always between the ASIC and the pool, not in either of them. A router that kills long connections, unstable internet, an overloaded Wi-Fi bridge, a provider that drops at night. The pool itself rarely goes down, the miner even more rarely.
The miner's config has backup pools, the second and third lines. On a timeout of the main one the ASIC moves there and keeps working. Empty backup lines mean downtime out of nowhere at any hiccup of the network.
Frequent short drops show up not in timeouts but in the share of late shares: they arrive, but after the job has already changed. If stales are growing, the link is bad, even when full drops have not started yet.
The short version
| What happens | the exchange with the pool goes silent, the link counts as lost |
| Usual suspect | router, Wi-Fi bridge, provider |
| What the miner does | reconnects or moves to a backup pool |
| Early sign | the share of late shares grows |
| Insurance | filled-in backup pool lines |
How to cure the drops
Fill in the backup pools in the config: the same addresses on other ports, or a second pool entirely. That is your first five minutes of work.
Take Wi-Fi out of the chain. A miner plus a bridge is two radio links in a row, a cable removes half of the mysterious drops.
Check the router logs for PPPoE drops or nighttime reconnects: the times will match the miner's outages.
Set a monitoring alert on worker silence: fifteen minutes of quiet should be a phone buzz, not a morning surprise.
Example from practice
A worker drops out of the stats every night around four, and in the morning it runs as if nothing happened. The router logs show a reconnect to the provider at the same time. The ASIC was never the problem: after the backup pools were filled in, the nighttime dips in earnings disappeared, though the provider's drop remained.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Software
- Software firmware
Hardware
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
Questions and answers
The ASIC is running but the pool shows it offline. Who is right
Both. The miner hashes locally, but the shares don't arrive, and for payouts that equals downtime. Look at the link between them.
How long is the timeout
Depends on the pool and the firmware, it is measured in minutes. Short network hiccups pass without a drop, a long silence kills the connection.
Does a backup pool fully save you from losses
Almost: you lose the seconds it takes to switch. That is nothing next to hours of downtime when there are no backup lines and the main pool is unreachable.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .