Are you using the getwork/longpolling port 8332?  I had this same problem but switched to stratum (3333) and have subsequently had no issues.

It's been a few hours and none of the 4 miners have had any communications problems with the stratum pool.  Thanks for the advice.

Didn't even know that was an option.  I will try that.  Thanks

Watching them, them seem to happen more often than not near/around a new block detected.  Are the pool servers getting overwhelmed with work requests?

(this is a slow miner, but it shows the example)

 [2013-05-06 12:48:33] Accepted ec784c92 Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 0
 [2013-05-06 12:49:07] LONGPOLL from pool 0 detected new block
 [2013-05-06 12:49:18] Pool 0 http://pool.50btc.com:8332 not responding!
 [2013-05-06 12:49:18] Switching to pool 1 http://stratum.btcguild.com:3333
 [2013-05-06 12:49:28] Accepted 14747813 Diff 12/1 GPU 0 pool 1
 [2013-05-06 12:49:49] Accepted e2fd1414 Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 1
 [2013-05-06 12:50:04] Pool 0 http://pool.50btc.com:8332 alive
 [2013-05-06 12:50:04] Switching to pool 0 http://pool.50btc.com:8332
 [2013-05-06 12:50:30] Accepted 03499f41 Diff 77/1 GPU 0 pool 0
 [2013-05-06 12:50:39] Accepted e43ee9a8 Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 0
 [2013-05-06 12:50:41] Accepted 2ae564a9 Diff 5/1 GPU 0 pool 0

This has been happening a lot to me recently:

[2013-05-06 12:30:02] Accepted 46d12787 Diff 3/1 GPU 0 pool 0
[2013-05-06 12:30:05] Pool 0 http://pool.50btc.com:8332 not responding!
[2013-05-06 12:30:05] Switching to pool 1 http://stratum.btcguild.com:3333
[2013-05-06 12:30:20] Accepted 34957ca4 Diff 4/1 GPU 0 pool 1
[2013-05-06 12:30:25] Accepted f6233d52 Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 1
[2013-05-06 12:30:28] Accepted 398a11d3 Diff 4/1 GPU 0 pool 1
[2013-05-06 12:30:44] Accepted bf6d1a6e Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 1
[2013-05-06 12:30:46] Accepted aff54d77 Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 1
[2013-05-06 12:30:55] Accepted ae11e4ba Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 1
[2013-05-06 12:30:57] Pool 0 http://pool.50btc.com:8332 alive
[2013-05-06 12:30:57] Switching to pool 0 http://pool.50btc.com:8332
[2013-05-06 12:31:00] Accepted ad03956f Diff 1/1 GPU 0 pool 0
[2013-05-06 12:31:01] Accepted 5029ed46 Diff 3/1 GPU 0 pool 0

I have 4 miners on 4 different computers, and they each experience this.  The times above are in US/Central. (most recent failure on a 680 mhash miner)

I only do about 2GH/s combined, and I reset my stats on BTC guild last night about 12 hours ago, and since then, I've failed over to them enough to submit 895 shares.

I saw a post a few days back on the previous page as well on this same topic.

I dabble on both, and I find (as I should find), that slush's pays more on average if you give it long enough to deal with the bad luck vs the good luck, and the BTC Guild's PPS is just a nice solid method with easy payouts.  It's just these really, really bad days that hurt things.  Over the last 2 days, with this huge spat of bad luck, basically have lost a full days worth of mining compared to a PPS.  But let it ride, and eventually it should even out.

So, it comes down to personal preference.  PPS for a zero variance (excepting of course difficulty changes) reward, or a score system like slush, which pays based on luck.

Things will most likely correct themselves (if you want to continue the mis-use of the phrase "free market", then use that here) as ASIC becomes more available to more people, and the other pools catch up and/or new pools are created.  There's just an unfortunate phase here were the top 4 users on BTC Guild comprise nearly 50% of their overall hash rate, and comprise nearly 25% of the overall hash network....

You obviously have not understood BTC Guild's reasoning and purpose of their fee change.  In point of fact, they are trying to protect the "free" and decentralized nature of bitcoin by try to get people to move to other pools so that their pool is not so singly powerful.  If some of the bigger users would voluntarily switch pools, then the pool would not have to be attempting to make the pool less desirable.  Heck, getting ASICminer to move would be sufficient

api.bitcoin.cz:8332 is indeed a proxy to both getwork and stratum, but if getwork is down, then connecting to this wigs out and you may or may not properly switch over to stratum.  This happened recently.  Probably best to just use stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333

I prefer coinbase, I have my reward sent straight to them, and every now and then (depending on gox's price) sell straight to my bank account.  They do a 1% fee, and there's like a $0.15 "bank fee".  Way cheaper than gox if you are cashing in in the single digit BTC or less.  Now, gox's $10 wire transfer fee is looking okay around the >$1000 worth, but...not for this small fry

One thing to note for the low mhash users, there was recently an increase in the bitcoin difficulty, thus causing a reduction in overall share value, and in terms of a pseudo-proportional scoring system like on slush's pool, that means your score will go down, and thus your reward.  I see some people talking about how things are "different" after the DDoS attack, but coincident to this attack, was the recent bump in difficultly, thus making a before/after comparison moot.

The problem here is that these are fairly long blocks, and the scoring system works in such a way that shares done towards the end count more than at the beginning, but the flip to this is that with slow share submission at the end it could look like you were not sending anything and your score would be decaying faster than you were adding shares.  Even if this was done with the simple calc of (your shares / total shares) * 25 * 0.98, you only be looking at 0.0002.  And and average submission rate of a bit more than 1 share per minute.  While slush's pool is pretty nice for most people, I don't think it is a great solution for such a low hash rate.  You're just getting unlucky with score decay and too steep of a curve at the end.

Huh, my lowly 1.6 GH/s was able to submit 13 shares.  That means you are only doing a measly 45 GH/s, and you call yourself an ASIC user?

17719 seems to be suspiciously light in rewards.  Thanks

Bah, this should still have received around 0.0001, unless you did those 135 shares towards the beginning and then stopped mining.  As such, your score decay would've zeroed it out.

gox provides a streaming web sockets api, and a little dhtml goodness and you've got some charts.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MtGox/API/Streaming

litecoin.org
https://www.litecoinpool.org/help

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining

Use the mt.gox api to create a trading applications.  Send/cancel orders.  Create a streaming socket market data application.

try adjusting the intensity to 9,9 (under GPU menu)