Mining as a backup workload

Mining on Salad is a backup, not the main event. It only runs when no container job is available for your machine, it pays very little on modern hardware, and you can turn it off. This page answers every common question about it.

What mining is on Salad today

Mining was Salad's original workload, back when it was a reliable way to put GPUs to work. Today container jobs for SaladCloud customers are what your machine earns from, and mining is simply the fallback that keeps the GPU doing something between jobs. The moment a container job is available, Salad stops mining and runs the job instead.

Salad is not a mining pool. It runs standard miners against third-party pools and credits you in Salad Balance, so you never deal with pools, wallets or coins yourself.

What it pays

On a modern GPU, mining may earn cents per day. It is generally much lower than container rates on the Network Monitor, and on many machines it earns less than the electricity it uses. Treat it as a signal that your machine is online and waiting, not as income. If you want more Salad Balance, the lever is container jobs; see How do I get container jobs?

Which programs run, and why antivirus flags them

Salad uses well-known open-source miners and picks the one that suits your GPU: XMRig, Rigel, T-Rex, lolMiner, GMiner, miniZ and TeamRedMiner. If one fails to start, Salad retries with another compatible miner, and the set changes over time as miners are updated or retired. Mining support for some newer cards, including NVIDIA's 50-series, has been inconsistent while the miners catch up with them.

Antivirus software very often flags these miners, because the same programs are abused by malware to mine on infected PCs without consent. On Salad they run only when you enable mining, in the open, and stop when you stop Chopping. If your antivirus quarantines them, mining won't run; see Antivirus for how to allow Salad, or just turn mining off.

Dev fees

The "dev fee" lines in your logs are not a Salad fee. Every open-source miner reserves a small share of its mining time for its own authors; that is how those projects are funded. Salad doesn't control it and doesn't receive any of it.

How Salad picks what to mine

Salad chooses the miner, algorithm and coin automatically, going for the most profitable option your GPU can run at stock settings. If that option fails, it falls back to the next best. You can't choose a coin or point Salad at your own pool, and only one GPU is mined on; if you have several very different cards, only the main one is used (see Can I use multiple GPUs?). Salad is limited to the pools and algorithms it is integrated with, so a coin that looks more profitable on another site may simply not be available to us.

How often it pays

Mining earnings are credited roughly every 15 minutes. Some intervals can be empty, because mining is probabilistic: your machine submits work, but rewards only arrive when a share is found. Over a day the total evens out to the expected rate for your card.

Why it doesn't match WhatToMine

Sites like WhatToMine or NiceHash show a best-case estimate: a GPU running perfectly, 24 hours a day, with average luck and nothing else running. Real mining is random and may not hit that. Salad also runs on stock clocks, uses only the pools it supports, and accounts for the miner's dev fee, so your rate will be lower than those estimates.

How to turn it off

If mining isn't worth it for you, which on modern hardware is usually the case, turn it off in the Salad app under Settings > Workload Types. You can also reach it via Performance > Configure Hardware > Advanced Options > Crypto Mining. Your machine will then wait in Finding Job between container jobs instead of mining.

If mining is enabled but won't run, see Troubleshooting mining jobs.