Does the amount of network traffic used by p2pool bother anyone? I have some ideas for how to reduce the amount of traffic (without improving propagation performance), but the traffic doesn't bother me, so I haven't made implementing it a priority.
The other project I have in mind is trying to improve fairness independent of performance by using some sort of share DAG (e.g. with uncles) or one of the other ideas mentioned in
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg19248232#msg19248232. That's going to require far more work than the network traffic reduction, though.
Alternately, I could work on polishing the current code a bit, merging into the main p2pool repo, and organizing the community to upgrade. If I do that before the fairness work, that means that we have to do another big upgrade later.
Thoughts?
The amount of network traffic can significantly affect users who are subject to data limits (Comcast users) and those who also run full node core. I know I bumped against my data ceiling last month. Reducing it slightly would definitely incentivise me to maintain a full running p2pool node even if I wasn't hashing at the pool. As with most things bitcoin, if it doesn't harm my wallet, I'll help where I can.