Thanks for the answer, now I understand how the ports work better, any ideas to lower the latency?
Ckpool is one of the few addresses that gives me high latency, I am beginning to believe that it will be from my ISP, but I have few options to change providers.
It's highly unlikely to be an ISP related issue, it's mainly about your geographical location and the distance between your miner and the pool's server, someone who lives next door to wherever the server is located will have less latency then someone with 10x faster internet connection but lives on the other side of the world.
As far as I know CKpool has a single server in the U.S, the other large pools have different servers in different locations which is probably why you are getting better results in terms of "ping", but, you need to be really far and have a shitty connection to have a ping high enough that would affect your mining operations, it isn't exactly accurate to just ping a pool's website, but it's good enough to get some results, so if you ping Ckpool and it doesn't take more than 200ms or so, you are good.
I personally tried mining to a PPS pool while being behind a VPN of another country in a different continent, mining to a pool in a completely different continent on the other side of the planet, and my rejected/stale shares were close to zero, the overall ping for that route was no less than 300-400ms and it was all good, I am not telling you it's perfectly safe to mine with 300ms, most pool operators won't take the risk of giving the green light because nobody wants to be held responsible, so they will generally tell you to try and keep it below 200ms (most of them won't even give you a number, to begin with), but based on my own personal experience, you will be good with up to 300ms, if you could bring it down to 30ms, ya even better, if not -- still works.
A question to the group with my ignorance on the subject, with an S9j as is my case that I play the lottery solo, which port should I point to 3333 or 4334 since I see that in 4334 it is very difficult to work but when it works, works better than port 3333.
Different ports handle pool difficulty differently, there is no way your miner would work better/worse just because of that, using high difficulty means fewer shares reported to the pool but every share is worth more, reported hashrate will fluctuate when you use high diff on a slow gear, eventually it will catch up and average out, but it would be pretty normal to see a 100th gear reports 500th and then 5th, but that doesn't change the fact that it's nothing but a 100th gear.
You and the pool want something in between, something reasonable, not too low that submits every share every ms and puts stress on the server, your router, and everything involved, also not something too large, where your miner needs 30 mins to find a share above the set difficulty and gives you all those wired readings and then you don't know what's the real hashrate your miner is getting.
Note that, all of that has exactly no effect on your chances of hitting a block, any share that hits a block with be greater than the difficulty set by any port/pool, but to ensure a smooth operation, always just the ports specified by the pool operator, if it tells you port x is for rental, it really means it's for rental, using it to mine directly could create issues along the way.
Thanks for the answer, now I understand how the ports work better, any ideas to lower the latency?
Ckpool is one of the few addresses that gives me high latency, I am beginning to believe that it will be from my ISP, but I have few options to change providers.
Mike.
depends on ware you are located exsample if your in the us and your mining on a eu or an asia stratium than latency plays a big factor if you want faster its recomended to mine on a stratiom that is located in your regin ie us if your in the us asia if your in asia eu if your in euroup
Thanks again for the answers.
I'm in Europe and the latency is always constant at 114, it strikes me that I have less latency in other pools in the US, honestly, I've been in ckpool for a while and it gives me a lot of confidence and since this is a lottery, if a block arrives welcome be!!.