What this tells me is that you CPU miner's would find more shares if you tried to raise you ask rate from 1 to 20 or more seconds.
This is simply not true.
Your chances of finding a suitable H==0 hash are the same, regardless of whether your ask rate is 1 work unit per nonce (a few nanoseconds), or 1 work unit per 0xffffffff nonces (minutes, on a CPU).
Furthermore, the chances of working on stale work
increase as you slow down the ask rate. A 60-second period means a lot of CPU miners could waste 59 seconds worth of electricity and CPU cycles, only to discover their solution is stale and invalid.
"Theoretically", yes. You have the same chance of finding a hash.
However, we have scanned over tens of thousands of shares worth of logs and found the
real-world proof that this simply isn't the case.
Likewise, a 20 second ask rate is BARELY increasing your chances of working on stale getworks.
Less than a 10th of a percent.There is no reason that a SINGLE USER should be generating the same amount of traffic as the rest of the pool, and no offence to you, because you've done many great things for the bitcoin community and I respect both your knowledge and opinions, but in this instance, I'm going to have to politely request that you let us run our pool the way we choose to run it.
Is there a nice easy to understand video that explains what a share is and what a block is and how the get work function and ask rate tie into that?
Why are the chances of getting a stale block higher with a get work every 60 seconds? How does a block become stale? What are we calculating the hashes of?
I read the wiki and bitcoin site faq and it still doesn't answer a lot of questions. I'd like to understand the generation of bit coins in much more depth. Thank you.