Quote from: richmke on March 18, 2014, 04:27:51 PM

Quote from: poolwaffle on March 18, 2014, 11:44:35 AM

when a coin switch happened, or when a new block was found, and we sent new work to the miner, the miner would be forced to do a pipeline flush (read "stop working" for a very short bit). During that time, these jacked up miners would submit the shares they hadn't submitted yet. We would accept them because they were coming in just after a switch, and we were being forgiving. However, in most cases (block changes are far more often than coin switches), these shares had a 0% profitability (they were stale).

I am new to mining, ....

Doesn't "difficulty" also have the same effect? Didn't you set the minimum difficulty to 512?

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On faster coins, these block changes are every few seconds, and that delay makes a huge difference in profitability.

So, let's say that with a difficulty of 512, I am submitting shares every 4 seconds. Wouldn't that make most of my shares stale?

Not the same at all. Difficulty will give you how long on average it takes to find a share (essentially). When those shares come in is completely random. If you randomly find them all between block switches, you'd have 100% accepted rate (regardless of difficulty). If you randomly find them all during block switches, you'll have a 0% accepted rate. Has nothing to do with difficulty.