Quote from: gyverlb on September 23, 2013, 04:27:06 PM

Quote from: HellDiverUK on September 23, 2013, 04:04:27 PM

Quote from: Nemesis on September 23, 2013, 03:47:00 PM

I havent kept up with P2pool for so long. Way back when i tried it with GPUs more than a year ago, its very resource hungry and variances were so high.

Still resource hungry, still high variance.

I was really keen to use P2Pool, and ran it for several months, but to be honest it was just too much - it needed a fast machine to run it, and payouts were pretty woeful. Half of any mining profits (if I got any at all) was wasted on power to run the i3 machine needed to make P2Pool perform anywhere near well enough. I tried to run it on a Sempron dual core 2.5GHz CPU, and it struggled with a measly 5GH/s. Someone said they ran P2Pool on a Celeron 847, but I think they were huffing glue.

Now I'm up to 35GH/s, I gave up on P2Pool. I get far better returns with less bother on a 'real' pool.

When was that? Before or after the last protocol fork (which made it efficient with most ASICs) which happened in July? If it was after the fork it's surprising as it should have solved these problems.

BTW, your hashrate shouldn't have any impact on the resources used by a P2Pool node:

Stratum offloads most of the work generation to the miner, leaving on average one computation to be done only when the node needs to update the coinbase (probably every 30 seconds on average unless it is aggressively pushing additional TX in the coinbase as they come, which would not be linked to the miners hashrate)
variable difficulty is used so that the node only receives one share per second on average to verify

I use an i5-3350P with 16GB and a 64GB SSD with ~20 altcoins nodes, 6 p2pool nodes, a PostgreSQL database for some datamining and several other daemons with an average load at ~4.
My efficiency is most of the time >102% for the Bitcoin p2pool node with an Avalon and several FPGAs mining on it.

Before that I only had an old Core2Duo at 3GHz with 6GB and the same SSD which was more than enough. I upgraded due to flaky hardware (integrated SATA controller dying) and the additional RAM allowed me to follow more altcoins.

Edit: forgot to add CPU usage stats, on average the Bitcoin p2pool node uses 5.2% of one of my CPU cores, bitcoind uses 2.2%.

I will give it a try. Is ur guide the most uptodate?