Quote from: maqifrnswa on May 03, 2013, 08:04:54 PM

Quote from: sdczen on May 03, 2013, 04:01:28 PM

Quote

Could you post the line from the p2pool program feed that looks like:
New work for worker! Difficulty: 0.000200 Share difficulty: 0.994552 Total block value: 50.210500 LTC including 10 transactions

It's still the same as mentioned above: "New work for worker! Difficulty: 0.232827 Share difficulty: 5.000000 Total block value: 53.123000 LTC including 45 transactions" This is using: Usrnme/5+5

P2pool version is: 11.3 (I tried 11.4, that seemed to decrease my share rate further) Cgminer version: 3.1.0.

I'm receiving payouts. The odd behavior is receiving consistent share/payout per block of .45 LTC for 12+ hours, then it drops to .10 for another 12 + hours. This happens when the p2pool node has been operating fine, along with all the miners connected. Smooth & even hashrates. The overall pool hashrate has a mean score of 580MH/s. I would anticipate a much lower payout if the pool hashrate jumped to 1,200MH/s, but it stays within 100-150+- MH/s variance of the mean score. My efficiency is normally between 110%-120%.

Thank you for the reply.

Thanks - I think this shows what's wrong:

1) your +5 difficulty is way to high so p2pool has already reduced it down to .232 (otherwise it would get no statistics)
2) the /5 difficulty is causing 200% higher variance than is typical. The payouts change so much because you are only submitting a rare high difficulty share instead of frequent low difficulty shares. p2pool is not a PPS payout system, but a PPLNS. When you find a share, you will get paid out every time p2pool finds a block for some period of time. If you find shares infrequently, there will be much variance. With a /5 difficulty, you'll find shares infrequently.

Both of those settings won't affect your expected or average payout, just change the variance and frequency of payouts.

i'd try one of these two:
1) don't use /difficulty+difficulty at all and let p2pool tune it for you (especially good if you're a small miner)
2) If you're a bigger miner and want to tune your difficulty, perhaps trying /2+.0002 as a starting point and tune as you see fit. If you're payout variance is too high, get rid of the /2. If you're statistics reporting to p2pool is too much (crashing the server) then increase +.0002 to something higher (or lower if you want more accurate statistics)

Thank you, I'm starting to get a better understanding of how P2pool LTC difficulty works now. There isn't much info regarding the subject (at least that I've found). It's still a bit murky on how p2pool assigns shares & what the requirement/per difficulty setting. Ideally, it would be nice to know that I'm only submitting hashes that meet the difficulty requirement to receive a share from p2pool. For example:

usrnme/2 = would require 200k share (cgminer etc..) to receive a share from P2pool.
usrnme/3 = would require 300k share
usrnme/4 = etc....

I've used the usrnme/2 difficulty and submitted (accepted) a 250K share from cgminer, and looked in P2pool to see if it counted, and it was not counted. Me being a pain in the arse, I like to understand how things work, so that I can apply them to my needs as best I can.

I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge, it's been a wealth of information!