I've recently been looking at the hash speeds of other pools, and now I'm a bit confused as to how one goes about actually choosing a pool. This is my current scenario:
Pool A: Less people, lower overall pool speeds. Blocks can take anywhere from 30min to 24hours (zomg..) to be solved, but on average it seems like it's 1 block every 5-7 hours. At my hash rate I get around 0.07btc per solved block.
Pool B: More people, massively higher pool speeds. Blocks are solved frequently, taking at most about 2hrs, but on average it seems to be less than an hour. At my hash rate I get only 0.007btc per block.
I get much higher rewards per block for mining in pool A, but it's disheartening to sometimes be stuck with a 12hour+ block. Blocks are solved a loooot faster in pool B, but over a 24 hour period or so, it seems I earn less in total than pool A.
Which one should I stick with?
If you want quick returns, picking pool B would make sense, sort of. Since you will see the rewards coming in faster, although like others have mentioned, in the long run, the two should return about the same amount.
However, as mentioned, for the long term stability/security of bitcoin, so that no single pool gets over 50% long enough to start manipulating things, I'd go with splitting contributions to two or more pools. Personally, I decided to pick a big pool and a small/med pool to average things out so went with bitguild for the big pool and still trying out smaller pools to decide which I want to go for with my second gpu.