Huh... we just passed 100 GHs. What's behind the increase?
So, I've been running some tests on Bitcoin Mining Proxy.
My test system is a VM running effectively nothing but BMP, bitHopper and the requisite requirements on a 30 Mbps symmetric connection.
BMP does not appear to scale very well, which I somewhat suspected from the start, since the overhead of Apache and HTTP setup would introduce lag. As the GH/s increase, the lag becomes a meaningful and ever increasing amount of your hash rate. From my tests, BMP saps approximately 12 - 20% of your hashing power in overhead. In my case, pushing 12 GH/s through it yielded ~9.85 - ~10 GH/s on average.
At lower hash rates, this decreased and at single card hashrates the difference may not be noticeable with out precise statistics. Even then, it may get lost in variance noise - but you are still losing the hashing power.
This can probably be mitigated by using a dedicated machine or even your localhost, though I have not tested either of these scenarios. I suspect from years of experience that in the likely event that you improve your hashrate you will never eliminate it due to the overhead of the connection setup. As miners get more efficient and profit margins become thinner and thinner, even small amounts of efficiency improvement are going to make a difference - possibly the difference between being in the red and in the black given energy costs.
The proxy idea is a good one, but unfortunately, it would likely need to be implemented at a much lower level than scripted PHP to be competitive.
This finding is a disappointment to me. I have some distributed miners and the majority of my miners are behind a NAT that I have no desire to open up to the outside world - the proxy is exceptionally convenient for me to redirect the miners or turn one or two off and on to test functionality on the pool. I have to manage 35 miners, and the proxy would make that much easier... but not at the cost of 2+ GH/s.
So, anyway, I thought I'd throw that out there for those of you using it to consider.
Have you tried smartcoin? I use it's profiles in combination with a Web UI I wrote to control my 4 rigs from my iPhone, Work or wherever.