Using --load-balance to split 30% to hashco.ws and 70% to cryptoculture.net, the latter's showing overly high hashrate, like 750-880Kh/s, when I only have a total of 464Kh/s! Sometimes it does show the correct rate around 260Kh/s though. I can only assume that this is a result of the way cgminer does load-balancing.
Is this going to negatively affect me by giving me an unsuitable difficulty if it thinks my hashrate is higher than it actually is?
Vardiff is calculated on the server by evaluating your current share rate... basically, the displayed client hash rate has nothing to do with the difficulty rating and such.
The only negative effect you'll see in load-balancing will come from mining on a PPLNS-style pool. Since you're switching around, you'll never get the full benefit of your PPLNS shares.
Great, thanks for explaining that and putting my mind at rest.
I thought the only issue with PPLNS pools was that you needed to stay on them more or less 24/7, because it calculates your payout not just on the shares submitted in the current round but previous ones as well, which dissuades pool-hopping. So if I'm using 130 of my 464 Kh/s on a PPLNS pool, obviously I'm not going to earn as much from that pool as if I allocated all my hashrate to it but it shouldn't be any different than if I only had 130Kh/s to use in total and was only on the PPLNS pool should it?
I'm really only on hashco.ws to mitigate against the fact that when they're mining SBC the other pools don't stand a chance of finding a block but perhaps that's not going to work out for me in reality and I'd be better off allocating all my hashrate to a SBC PPS pool, I'm not really sure how to know.