It's all in the setup my man. I gave up using high powered & expensive gear on p2pool, it's simply not worth it due to the limit of mining gear that actually works with it, unless you got an ASIC & are knowledgeable & bothered enough to faff around with it to make it work. I opted for energy efficiency over performance with p2pool & it's now worth while actually using it. I use a Sempron 145 with unlocked core (making it a 45w dual core Athlon II X2 OC'd @ 3.4!!) with 8Gig 1600 RAM, a separate SSD for the 6 merged mined coins data & a Gold 850W PSU running Xubuntu 64bit 12.04. My miner is an old Acer One Netbook (Xununtu) running 40 usb's (it gives the lowest reject/hw error rate of all my equipment: <1%) All this goes through a UPS that shows a measly 225 watts draw. That's less than the average desktop PC. I also gave up faffing around with the settings, most of the suggestions in g's guide actually made things worse anyway (after all, it's a guide, not a bible), but everybody's setup is different of course - but my rig likes things standard.

All this talk of having to be some sort of geeky administrator to get p2pool to run right makes me laugh - if a dope-head like me can do it, anyone can. I struggle with compiling stuff FFS   A geek I am not, I chuff.

P2pool will never be a "real" pool until the compatibility issues are sorted out. When noobs can come along, plug in & play, the pool will grow to be what it deserves to be, like every other pool has. Until then, for me anyway, it's a toy to play with - a learning process - but a fun one. it might even payout once or twice. If you're lucky   .