Using SSDs will speed up plotting, but unfortunately they have significantly more limited lifespans.

• Recommendation is to plot in parallel on many HDDs at once; and not use SSDs.

It is more efficient to plot in parallel, rather than series.

• Stagger multiple plotting instances to start 30 minutes or more apart.

More RAM will marginally increase speed of plot creation.

There are 4 major phases to plotting.

• Phase 1 (Forward Propagation): Utilizes multi-threading.
  • Takes a long time.
  • Use the -r flag to specify the number of threads. Ideally greater than 2, example -r 2.
  • Above 4 threads there are diminishing returns.
• Phase 2 (Back Propagation): No multi-threading.
• Phase 3 (Compression): No multi-threading.
  • Takes a long time.
• Phase 4 (Checkpoints): No multi-threading.
  • Completes the plot file and moves it to the final destination.

chia plots create -r 2 -t {plotting-folder} -2 {temp_dir_2} -d {final-folder}