Sorry if this is slightly off topic but I can't figure out why the earnings appear to be down about 30%. I was consistently seeing around 0.08 BTC per Ghash/sec per block with some natural variance. After sometime on 6/8 or 6/9, it looks like that dropped and remains closer to 0.55 BTC.
Was there a difficulty increase around that time? Or is this just a function of the increased usage after the new servers came online, and maybe there's some other upside to offset this that I'm not understanding.
My own stats are a bit difficult to look at in a vacuum as I've recently added additional hardware, roughly doubling my hash rate but increasing the payouts considerably less.
Thanks - sorry if this is really a novice question, but I'm kind of a novice still.
Others may have answered the question and I am sorry if I duplicate anything.
1. Higher difficulty lately [late Sunday early Monday CDT was a 33+% increase].
2. Block size varies with a given difficulty period and lately blocks have been significantly larger than difficulty would suggest. This affects all pools and solo miners equally (the good news is that future blocks should have some smaller than normal sizes). <-- This is the one I suspect most people aren't paying attention too
3a. Your own personal luck [I don't actually believe in luck, so let's use "statistical variation"].
3b. Pool luck [same as above, but as a group there is statistical variation ... past never affects the future, so pool jumping to escape this is useless].
4. You are hashing at the same rate [presumably all your miners are the same and running], but perhaps you are getting more stale/rejected shares? I advise to stay away from Phoenix if you want to reduce those significantly [unless you use the phatk kernel with 58xx and maybe other 5xxx series cards where my 5850 sees more than a 3% increase in hash rate offsetting the defect in phoenix stale shares].
5. You aren't donating 2.5% and thus not paid for invalid blocks [deepbit.net pays out for invalid blocks, but they charge 3% flat anyway, so ... there you go
].
6. Communication glitches ... watch your logs and run a traceroute and ping test to the pools and see if you are having issues [it is tough to know which pool you are connected too if you use the load balancer which is host btcguild.com ... although if you are running Linux, you can just use tcpdump to figure it out quickly]. You may have to select a pool specifically; if so, check from time to time whether you need to leave it that way; sometimes it is a temporary network issue between you and the pool and it is best for the pool at large to use btcguild.com as the host.
Just a brain dump of the things that come to mind for me immediately upon reading your post. Things I had to do when I first [re]connected last night [while things were still settling in fact].