What an independent speed test says about WarpPool — and the one latency that actually matters
There’s a small open-source tool solo miners use to measure their pool’s response time: mweinberg’s Stratum speed-test. We ran WarpPool through it, against 20 other well-known solo pools, from an ordinary German home line.
The result, honestly: WarpPool lands in the top group (~18 ms ping, ~37 ms handshake), in the same tight band as the leading German pools. Solid. But here’s the framing that matters more to us than the ranking:
This miner-to-pool ping barely matters in solo mining. It only really counts at one moment — the block change. And that’s exactly where we put the work: not into the ping these tests measure, but into the latency that actually does something.
The block change, tightened. The instant a new block appears on the network, the pool has to build a fresh template and push new work to miners — the faster it does, the less time you waste on the old block. WarpPool can pull its template straight from Bitcoin Core’s (experimental) IPC interface. Roughly the pool-controlled path from block to fresh work at the miner (rounded, same location assumed):
- WarpPool (IPC): ~10 ms to fetch the template + ~8 ms to deliver ≈ ~20 ms
- The classic way (GBT+ZMQ): ~95 ms to fetch + ~8 ms to deliver ≈ ~105 ms
The entire lead (~80 ms) sits in the template step — the miner ping is the same for both and can’t close it. It’s opt-in and needs Core 31, and none of the usual self-hosted solo pools offer it at all. Honestly framed: in absolute terms that’s milliseconds every ten minutes — measurable, but no earnings miracle.
And more honestly still: the template step is only one part. How fast a pool reacts to a block change overall depends mostly on how quickly its node hears about the new block — a question of network connectivity, where large, widely-peered nodes lead. IPC is the part we do cleanly, not a claim to react first.
And what actually makes a solo pool good, no ping can measure:
- 0 % fee, non-custodial — you mine to your own address, full reward, nothing held.
- Built for small miners — sub-1 difficulty from the very first share (NerdMiner class), and difficulty that survives even a pool restart.
- Reproducible, not just claimed — signed, reproducible releases; you can verify the binary came from exactly this source.
You can check both yourself — the ping with the tool, the builds with our signatures:
python3 stratum_test.py pool.warppool.org 3333 --runs 3
-> GitHub - mweinberg/stratum-speed-test: A simple script to test latency, stratum handshake speed, and TLS+stratum connection speed to Bitcoin mining pool stratum servers. · GitHub
Honest stays honest: the pool runs publicly on mainnet but has not found a block yet — the project is young. WarpPool is a from-scratch Rust solo pool, non-custodial, 0 % fee, self-hostable. 