I see, that makes sense.
All the PPS pools are super busy and can swing that. They appear to be making their money from TX fees, while pps+ is looking like 4% fees.
Totally was the confusion.
Will add a pps / pps+ (not 4% for sure lol) pool to my rotation. Will be nice to be able to mine for a day and not have to worry about a block find. Or shutting down mid round.
Thanks again!
All PPS pools charge more because their model is so risky (they act like a bank) so a 4% fee is common. From them, viabtc as mentioned can take a long time for a payout due to the minimum withdrawal, which most of those pools set at 0.01₿, except Poolin which is half that.
The other PPLNS pool is also taking months for payments, but there is in fact one that does find many blocks very often.
There is also
Slushpool. This pplns pool takes 2%, and with 6 Exa hashes per second, its finding about 10 blocks per DAY. So yeah, ramping up and averaging is instant, PPS like with half the fees... Min withdrawal is still 0.01₿ (unless you are willing to lose an extra 0.0001₿ per withdraw).
The + thing usually means they don't keep the tx (miner) fees, this is what most pools (except Antpool) do nowdays.
Bitmain's firmware from 2019 onwards, removes SSH access. Since you have Linux experience, you should already know how bad this is.