Quote from: Epinnoia on November 09, 2013, 03:23:46 AM

In theory, on extensive tests, I should see no benefit to mining at diff 2 vs. diff 8 over extended periods of time. But in actuality, I was seeing poorer results in the neighborhood of 100-150mhps. If I am going to lose credit for my current work, I'd much rather lose 2 or 4 than 8 or 16...or 512 or 1024. Granted, those come up less frequently.

If I can come up with a better way of demonstrating it, I will. Maybe there is some other explanation for what I was observing. *shrugs*

my good fury produced:

At work diff 2, effective 2.11ghps.
At work diff 4, effective 2.03ghps.
At work diff 8, effective 1.94ghps.

Why, then, is this happening? I ran it longer than 2 hours on each. I suppose it could be bad luck, so I will try each again.

What you're seeing is one of the reasons I prefer to mine at lower difficulty if I can. It also just appears to me that I'm disproportionately finding the lower difficulty values just at eyeballing the logs.

However the statement made in

Quote from: Epinnoia on November 09, 2013, 02:54:59 AM

If those random hardware errors cause the entire current work unit to fail, then it's best to keep their effect to as small a portion of work as possible.

Let's pretend that work diff of 64 takes about 10 mins, on average, to produce an accepted result. If you have a single hardware error in that 10 minutes, you wasted the entire 10 minutes.

to me made it seem like you were expecting with 50% hardware errors your effective utility halfing if you doubled your difficulty.

Sorry for my misinterpretation of your statement.

There is a chance you could waste that entire 10 minutes block, but 1 error isn't going to guarantee that is what I was clarifying. In fact, it should approach a probabilistically smaller of a chance at higher difficulties.