You'll always do better with your own node.
EDIT: assuming you have the bandwidth for it.
Question on this...
What kind of sustained bandwidth does a normal mining operation consume? I have a 30MB up/down pipe and was wondering what I should allocate. I can build a DMZ for my local P2Pool server to run on, and set the limits on bandwidth. Would 2MB be enough? More?
You have tons of bandwidth. I'm able to do pretty well with 3MB down and 768k up, as long as I only use Bitcoin. When I start merge mining, I get problems because of bandwidth issues.
M