Quote from: dency45 on February 21, 2014, 12:55:46 PM

Quote from: zureman90 on February 21, 2014, 12:53:54 PM

there seems to be a problem with worker difficulty. my difficulty shot up to 512, i'm only mining at 700kh/s and have d=64 set as password, does anyone have similar problems?

read this.

Quote from: poolwaffle on February 21, 2014, 11:35:48 AM

Quote from: coyote on February 21, 2014, 11:17:36 AM

Good Morning poolwaffle - I sympathise with the problem & really admire the effort you are putting in to make the pool the best it can be.

Just to try thinking outside the box for a moment and to try to gain an advantage by acting slightly differently to other pools - could you preempt a coin becoming the most profitable by tracking the growth, or decline, in profitability rather than the absolute profitability. That way it MAY be possible to jump on a coin before it is the obvious choice (and most importantly the other pools) and jump off just before the profitability dies?

Just throwing my thoughts out there

More often than not, the change in profitability is due to difficulty fluctuations rather than price changes (probably about 95% of the profitability is difficulty-based). Meaning that you really can't get a head-start on it, as if you think the difficulty is about to drop, it hasn't yet, and its still unprofitable. Only after the drop (when everyone sees it at the same time) is it profitable.

One thing that may be changing here in a minute, is I'm going to try locking difficulty to 512. I'm worried a bit of our orphan problem is bandwidth based (unable to broadcast new blocks fast enough). And some of that bandwidth has to do with stratum. Higher difficulty shares = fewer shares (overall worth the same amount) = lower bandwidth.

Going to set difficulty to hard-locked 512 (will ignore anything you personally set via the d=xxx method). Will leave it for a few hours and see how it goes.

For those of you with smaller miners (100 KHs or less), you'll definitely see higher variance, but overall your profits should remain the same.

Can anyone explain variance?

It seems I missed that post. Explains it, thanks!

=> Variance is the difference in profits you earn over a set amount of time. For example, with low difficulty you steadily earn xx BTC/hour. With high variance you often earn a lot less or a lot more, but it still evens out in the end.