I know this topic has been discussed before, but I would like some further clarification in discussion. I recently upgraded my hashing power from 160Mhash/s to 1.3Ghash/s. I found my network traffic was about 10Mb/h before, and since I will be hashing much faster now and I don't want to be consuming almost 10 times the bandwidth. Is it usefull to turn up my difficulty? Should I expect loss from turning my difficulty to something like 5? Is it right to assume that the result will then be that I submit shares 1/5 as fast but they are worth 5x as much while the work submitted still occupies the same number of bits as diff 1? I have tried running this difficulty for a few days now and noticed I still catch the >1 minute blocks. Haven't been carefully analyzing the bandwidth though.
10 MB/h? That sounds too high. The stratum protocol was designed to use kilobytes per share. You can try it. You wont lose anything but your Utility will drop because its submitting fewer, more difficult shares. So for every 1 you submit, the pool counts it as 5.