External miner
Both miners are not yet optimized, but the built-in wallet miner is even worse, it does not use the GMP library which should give it a big boost.
Have you done any work on it yet? I might try to this weekend. I can see a number of improvements.
I'm giving it one last try using a single RPC server for all of my farm machines now to see if I get any blocks. Time to block is around 14 minutes with my farm so we will soon see.
Why is that karma? If I choose to spend money (just as you or anyone else can) to use VPS's to mine, why have I done something wrong?
Congrats by the way, you're lucky!