Re: [600 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool
Heh, I went for the "scorched earth" peer list approach to see what happens... 
I went to the p2pool node info page, sorted by country, exported to CSV, then some grep, awk, cut and echo'd the 84 U.S. nodes that resulted. Currently it appears I've active peering connections with 60+ of them outbound (hovering between 62-64 average connected).
I'm of the mindset that it doesn't hurt to peer with as many nodes as you are able to reliably communicate with, since you want to get your shares out to the network as fast as possible, before everyone else. If you are able to announce your share outbound quickly to as many nodes as you can, you might just win that race. I could be completely off in my thinking, and hurting myself by having so many peers connected. Time should tell tho I think, and if my efficiency suffers, then it might be better to approach it more methodically.
I went to the p2pool node info page, sorted by country, exported to CSV, then some grep, awk, cut and echo'd the 84 U.S. nodes that resulted. Currently it appears I've active peering connections with 60+ of them outbound (hovering between 62-64 average connected).
I'm of the mindset that it doesn't hurt to peer with as many nodes as you are able to reliably communicate with, since you want to get your shares out to the network as fast as possible, before everyone else. If you are able to announce your share outbound quickly to as many nodes as you can, you might just win that race. I could be completely off in my thinking, and hurting myself by having so many peers connected. Time should tell tho I think, and if my efficiency suffers, then it might be better to approach it more methodically.
Ok, this was my line of thinking. But you took it waaaay further. For that, I applaud you!
I'm beefing up my peers with a slightly different strategy: sort the node list by uptime and use the oldest nodes with reasonable latency. I figure that the oldest nodes will have the deepest roots into the p2pool network. Ok, I hope we just didn't ruin our competitive advantage here...