Chia Plot Status: How to Monitor Your Farming Efficiency Farming Chia (XCH) relies on Proof of Space and Time. Your earnings depend entirely on keeping your plots active, responsive, and properly synced. If your plots face high latencies or lookup delays, you miss out on block rewards.
Monitoring your farming efficiency ensures your hardware performs optimally and no drive goes offline unnoticed. The Core Metric: Plot Lookup Time
The most critical factor in Chia farming is how fast your harvester responds to challenges.
The 30-Second Window: Your harvester must find and return proof qualities within 30 seconds of a challenge.
The 5-Second Target: Aim for plot lookup times under 5 seconds to account for network propagation delays.
The Risk: Lookups exceeding 30 seconds result in missed signage points and lost rewards. Method 1: Using Chia Plot Status (Third-Party GUI)
Chia Plot Status is an open-source, user-friendly desktop application designed to track both plotting progress and farming health. Key Monitoring Features
Harvester Health: Displays real-time response times for all connected drives.
Warning System: Highlights slow lookups or drives that stop responding.
Centralized View: Consolidates logs from multiple harvesters into one dashboard. How to Set It Up
Download the latest release from the official GitHub repository. Open the application and navigate to the settings menu.
Add the path to your Chia log directory (usually found in /.chia/mainnet/log/).
View the dashboard to check your average lookup speeds and drive statuses. Method 2: Analyzing Native Chia Logs (CLI)
For advanced users or headless setups, the native Chia log files provide raw, precise performance data. Step 1: Enable INFO Logging
By default, Chia restricts log details. You must increase the log level to see lookup times.
Open your config.yaml file (located in /.chia/mainnet/config/). Search for the log_level parameter. Change its value from WARNING to INFO. Restart your Chia daemon. Step 2: Filter for Lookup Times
Use command-line tools to extract lookup speeds from the debug.log file.
Linux / macOS: Run this command to stream live lookup times:
tail -f ~/.chia/mainnet/log/debug.log | grep “plots eligible” Use code with caution. Windows (PowerShell): Run this command: powershell
Get-Content ~.chia\mainnet\log\debug.log -Wait | Select-String “plots eligible” Use code with caution. Understanding the Log Output
A healthy log entry looks like this:0 plots eligible for size 32… Found 0 proofs. Time: 0.12345s. Total 100 plots
Focus on the Time value. If this value consistently exceeds 5 seconds, your storage subsystem is bottlenecked. Troubleshooting Efficiency Drops
If your monitoring tools reveal high lookup times or missing plots, investigate these common culprits: 1. Hard Drive Sleep Settings
External USB drives often spin down to save power. When a challenge arrives, the drive takes several seconds to spin back up, causing a massive lookup delay. Disable APM (Advanced Power Management) or sleep mode on all farming drives. 2. Overloaded USB Controllers
Connecting too many external enclosures to a single USB controller bogs down transfer speeds. Distribute your drives across different USB host controllers or switch to internal SAS/SATA expansion cards. 3. High CPU or RAM Utilization
If your farming machine is simultaneously plotting, the CPU might bottleneck. Ensure you leave at least one unthreaded CPU core and a few gigabytes of RAM strictly available for the harvester and node processes. To help tailor this advice to your setup, let me know: Are you running on Windows, Linux, or macOS? What is your approximate total plot count or farm size? Are you farming locally or using a farming pool?
I can provide specific script configurations or commands based on your environment.
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