Well i had this long rant typed out but i erased it.
I decided to come back to btcguild after a month of good sailing at deepbit.
I left btcguild because my miners were not getting work reliably as they should.
A month later, my miners are still not getting work as reliably as deepbit provides.
I see failed to connect errors, disconnected from server, work queue empty, etc...
More then deepbit ever gave me. Seriously.
I am a net eng. I actually control the full path of my packets right to my gigE connection
with level3 which carries my packets to the IP addresses btcguid.com resolves to in Germany.
I can detect a network problem. There aint one. No dropped packets via ping while i watch
miners go idle. The problem happens randomly to miners on different boxes, different cards, etc..
Things go well for an hour and then a couple of miners go idle.. get some work.. go idle.. get some
work.. go idle.. then finally stabilize again.
Something just ain't right. Am I the only one? I doubt it based on comments I read in other threads
over time.. and here is the same problem again. I was thinking it was due to new blocks being announced
with a slight delay but the timing is just not right and other miners chug right along.
I am about to switch back. Maybe other users can comment? Maybe the admin knows of the problem but
has decided this is as good as it gets?
I dunno.
I am having the exact same issue as you. I use Phoenix with phatk2 for all my miners and there are 16 of them. My donation is also set to 2.5%.....
Does the pool operator know whats going on and is working on a fix? i have actually sent a few emails to the support link on the website but have never received a reply....
I am not trying to be an asshole, but if only two people have a problem then it might not be a high priority fix. I am sure Eleuthria monitors the servers and when there is an issue on his end where a huge chunk of the pool is having issues connecting/idles, he works his ass off to fix it the best he can. It really sounds like in order to fix your individual problems he would basically have to sit down with you one on one and try to troubleshoot. There is no guarantee that this will work though, because sometimes you run out of ideas when things look like they should work on both ends.
The golden rule of debugging things. If one or two people complain of a problem more then likely the problem is much more wide
spread then you think. I am going to guess 100s of miners have already left and are probably never going to come back. Thus why
the pool speed, before the price of BTC hit such lows, kept shrinking to "about" what you see today.
I have already had two people private message me complaining of the same thing but they did not want to post about it in the
open and perhaps cause more of a problem for the admin. (As in drive away traffic. They think the admin is a nice guy).
If the admin feels the pool is working well enough for most people... I am just waiting for him to say it. Thus I will know this
pool is probably never going to work for me and some others. I am going to guess many other miners have very little idea this
is happening to them as much as they realize. I am going to guess there is a problem on the servers where they cannot handle
all the requests they are getting for a few moments in time which happens repeatedly over the day.
But hey.. i am trying to give constructive criticism here. It is up to the owner to decide what to do with it. I know I appreciate
when my customers tell me when something is wrong. Quite often they are right and it was NOT them.