"every time they switch coins, my miners all seem to swap over to my secondary pool for several minutes"
did you use cgminer <= 3.5.0?
if not, you should redo your tests.
Why is that?
because >3.5.0 has a delay of 5 minutes when a pools fails, thus you loose a lot of mining on hashcows, due to coin switches.
earlier versions have a much shorter delay, so are more suited to multicoin pool mining.
Ah ok. Two questions though:
1) Is there maybe a config switch in >3.5.0 to manually set a shorter delay? If yes, would 1 minute be a safe number to set this to?
2) Are you not sacrificing some other possible benefits when not using the latest GPU-scrypt cgminer (3.7.2)?
Thanks!
1) not that I know of: but you could modify the source; I don't think it's worth because of 2)
2) i heard some people use 3.3.2 o similar because of supposedly better performance; I myself have used 3.7.2 on a conventional pool and seen no difference with earlier versions.