It looks like you don't understand two basic mining concepts, called "variance" and "difficulty". These are the two most important concepts for a new miner to learn and understand. I recommend researching these two concepts before investing in any mining hardware. And please learn from intelligent people like Organofcorti and Meni Rosenfeld, not the people who post misinfirmation on this forum on purpose.
But I will try to respond to your post below:
You need to UPGRADE your server, one PH/s I lose too much hashing power because of traffic bottle-necking, too many connections. Tried your pool for a week today and I am disconnecting today too due to having too great of a hash power loss compared to when I joined when you were below 1PH/s. I'll assume you're hosting online, most hosts can do an upgrade in an hour or so.
I don't understand what you mean. There is plenty of free filehandles on the server, we could easily handle a couple hundred thousand more connections. There is also plenty of free bandwidth. I don't see any kind of bottle necks. The load is actually much lower than it has been in the previous 12 months. In the past we have handled loads MUCH MUCH higher than what we see today.
The load on the server is much lower now than when we were below 1 PH/s. There are much fewer connections, much lower CPU usage and much lower memory usage. This is because there are fewer people mining. We can easily handle an unlimited hashpower. It's the number of people/workers mining that creates the load, and the load keeps dropping lower and lower all the time, as the smallest miners give up.
The server is almost falling asleep at this point.
During the GPUMAX days there were loads challenging me to improve the Bitminter server software to properly handle it when GPUMAX turned on the firehose. Eventually, after many improvements, Bitminter became one of their favorite pools because it could handle extreme loads. Today with the stratum protocol and with fewer people mining, the load that mining pools are seeing is very small and any newbie programmer could write software to handle it on cheap and slow server hardware.
That's why you're having such a hard time to find blocks as of late, you're not using the pool's complete hashing potential I am afraid. I observed about 10%-20% average hashing power loss using your pool compared to other modern, non-beta pools I have tested. Has nothing to do with the recent difficulty increase, made really little to no difference.
This is a modern and non-beta pool. And we are using 100% of the hashing power.
Luck goes up and down. But we are very close to the average expected number of blocks found.
As the difficulty goes up you need more hashpower to find the same number of blocks per day.
No surprise there. It is as expected.
If you think a difficulty increase of 10-15% makes no difference then you don't understand what the difficulty is and you need to research it further. I've heard it from some miners before: "I don't think difficulty actually has any impact on mining". If you have such thoughts then you need to consult your local psychiatrist and/or mathematics professor.
I noticed the difference the minute BMT went back over 1PH/s and kept growing on it. I monitor my workers like a hawk, so I know in real time what's going on, at all times of the day and when your stats show almost 50GH/s difference from my miner's interface to yours for most of the time, I start asking questions because that's rather significant, in my book anyways. Connection is steady though.
The server does not know your hashrate. The website tries to make an estimate of your hashrate based on how many proofs of work you sent in during the last couple minutes. This is very inaccurate.
You could take a look at the estimated hashrate for a shift rather than the live hashrate esimates. The shift estimates are more accurate as they are estimated over more time. Have a look at
https://bitminter.com/shiftsYour server needs a hardware upgrade and maybe very well, bandwidth.
The current server has very low bandwidth usage, very low CPU usage, and very low memory usage. I'm not sure what kind of server upgrade would help. Actually, I know that no server upgrade would help. An increasing bitcoin difficulty isn't balanced out by upgrading a mining server. You need more hashpower, that's the only thing that can do it, and it has nothing to do with the mining server.
Sorry but I can't mine here with only having 400GH/s with a 50GH/s loss due to bottle-necking. People buy machines that clock at 50GH/s, right now it's like I have one of those and your pool's rejecting the whole thing.
What kind of bottle-necking are you talking about? The load on the server is extremely low. The server is basically falling asleep from boredom because of the low load. There is no bottle neck.
If you are getting over 10% rejected work then something is seriously wrong. The average reject ratio for all users in the pool right now is about 0.13-0.14%. If you are not actually getting rejected work, but just saw your 400 GH/s display as 350 GH/s at the website for a moment, this is normal - the website live hashrates are (inaccurate) estimates of your real hashrate.
Please understand this: the server load and network load is almost zero. We find fewer blocks now than some months ago because the difficulty has increased very quickly.
As a miner one of the most important topics for you to research and understand is "difficulty".
To newbie miners: please stop thinking server load is proportional with hashrate. The server load comes from the number of workers mining in the pool. Even the biggest pools today can run on a single server if their software is efficient.
To experienced miners: yes, it is true, fewer and fewer people are mining. Mining is becoming more and more centralized. Small miners give up when their hashpower becomes insignificant and buying significant hashpower is out of their budgets. It is an unfortunate development. This may be important for the future of bitcoin.