Ok... so the hashrate of the pool increased by 700 GH/s overnight. No idea where that came from and that's why things started getting backed up. I knew we were up against a hard limit on share processing and was the driving reason behind adding another DC to handle the load, but I didn't expect 700 GH/s overnight.
It's all good now though, I have it covered and I can deploy even another server (each server should be able to handle ~1.5 - 1.7 TH/s in it's current configuration) if need be in a few minutes.
Now let me ask this:
What do you guys think about doing away with difficulty 1 shares entirely and moving to difficulty 10 across the board? How many people would that impact ultimately?
I suspect much of that 700GHps came from Ozcoin patrons who didn't want to pay the 3% fee instigated yesterday. It happens to match the hashrate drop at Ozcoin.
To address your question: the only effect difficulty-10 shares should have is to increase variance. The specific details depend on the pool's DGM parameters. The payout expectation will not change so in the long run it makes no difference. It *should* have a positive effect on pool performance since it will only need to send out 1/10th of the getworks it is currently doing.
My only concern would be the effect on stales. If a miner is working on a 10-difficulty work, will there be a significantly greater chance of stales? Since the miner would be reporting to the pool only 1/10th as often, intuitively it would seem that there would be a greater change of a work unit becoming stale when a new block is announced on the network (instead of miner throwing away, say 5 seconds of work, they could potentially be throwing away 50 seconds of work when that happens).
I know you've been running a test server with a greater-than-1 share difficulty ... what were your results with that?