I just switched over yesterday. Yes, the 8 day ramp is kinda painful and I don't fully understand why it is necessary? I'm willing to stick it out because small pool mining seems like much more fun, but maybe someone could explain the rationale for the 8 day ramp a little better?
The "ramp" time varies based on difficulty and pool hash rate. Right now it's pretty large.
The advantages, once you get ramped up, is that you are sort of "invested", for lack of a better word. What I mean is, let's say you have a power outage, and during that time when your miners are offline, the pool finds a block. During that time you are "ramping down", however you will still get a credit for your 5N portion of the block.
That also means if/when you leave the pool, you experience the 5N ramp down period, so you get (proportional) credits for any blocks during that time.
M
Thanks Mdude77. That helps.