has anyone evaluated running multiple instances of slush's proxy but on different ports... like the --gp 8332, --gp 8333 etc?
That's what I've been doing all along... Sorry if that was unclear. A new VM for each cube just sounds like it would eat up waaay too much RAM.
I'm after some advise on how I can get my cube to successfully mine on two separate pools, as in the primary/backup function, so if one looses connectivity or times out for any reason, it switches to the other pool.
...
Also what does diff 64, 128 and 256 mean?
Here's an example.
proxy1.bat:
mining_proxy.exe --host stratum.bitcoin.cz --port 3333 --getwork-port 8332 --stratum-port 3333
proxy2.bat:
mining_proxy.exe --host stratum.btcguild.com --port 3333 --getwork-port 8331 --stratum-port 3332
Then in your cube config page, set the ports to 8332,8331
The various difficulty settings are simply a way to control the bandwidth used by limiting the number of shares submitted. Lower difficulty shares means a more accurate hashrate reported by the pool, vs higher difficulty shares means less bandwidth but higher variance.
I ended up building a small Ubuntu VM per Cube for a proxy; it actually doesn't use much ram or disk space so it's not too much of a big deal. It is a pain in the ass since I'd like a single instance to cover all cubes and direct them all to slush's pool. Anyway, with 4 cubes, I have 4 proxies and they will fail over to one of the other cubes should their primary fail. I noticed when I was sharing one proxy, even with different ports and workers - I was getting ~25Gh/s, but once it's on a dedicated proxy it jumped over 30Gh/s. I may have to alter things once again when I start adding more cubes.