Quote from: maggsh on September 12, 2017, 10:27:15 PM

One aspect that I haven't been able to find much information about though is the difficulty setting. How does this come into play, and what difference does it make if I set it to for example 32, 64, 128 or... Something else.

Looking through the thread, and peering at the various screenshots of cgminer running I can tell that different people on here run at different difficulty settings. I also vaguely recall from when I set up the first stick I received that I saw a recommendation on setting --suggest-diff to 32, so I used that for a long time. But having played with it the last couple of days I can't really see anything happening if I change it?

Any insights on this would be much appreciated, or links to a place where this may already have been explained (my sincerest apologies if I missed it previously in the thread).

Thanks for all your contributions on here, this thread is gold!

That's gold, Jerry! Gold!!

From this thread:

Quote from: sidehack on March 24, 2017, 03:23:49 PM

Shares are what you're sending to the pool. It's the result of the hashing calculation. The diff you get from the pool is a share value threshold below which cgminer doesn't bother to send that share to the pool. This keeps down traffic, since if a pool accepted every value-1 share bandwidth requirements would be through the roof with modern high-hashrate miners. Your returned shares could have a value in the millions or billions; this is statistically unlikely but it does happen on occasion. The more hashrate you have, the more likely you are to return higher shares, so the higher the pool's discard threshold gets. Every share is weighted by that threshold and summed up (that's the "A" field in cgminer's display, means Accepted), and that's what is used to determine your mining payout because it's a representation of how much work you're doing. Shares are all weighted by that diff value but every individual share could have a different value (which is reported in cgminer when a share is accepted). The only share that actually matters is the one over network difficulty, which is the one that makes a block. The rest are just used to divvy up the block payout to everyone in the pool.

So "shares" is the total number of shares you've submitted, "bestshare" would be the highest-value share you submitted in the current round (?) and bestever would be the highest-value share ever submitted under your mining account. They're not really used for any payout calculations or anything (except total shares, indirectly), but some people like to know that info.

I'm not sure it matters much with the 2Pacs, or any other stick miner, other than at start up.