1. Upgrade bitcoind to the latest possible version (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/082rc1-ready-for-testing-201124)
2. With p2pool we are real miners and make our own blocks, so edit the important settings in your bitcoin.conf!
blockmaxsize=250000 # default: 250000
blockprioritysize=27000 # default: 27000
mintxfee=0.0002 # default: 0.0001
minrelaytxfee=0.0002 # default: 0.0001
Until bitcoind gets optimized, getblocktemplate just gets too slow with the default minrelaytxfee=0.0001.
Maybe this is hardware or environment related? I'm still using default settings and latest p2pool. My stale rate is always 10-15% less than the pool's rate. Yes, according to p2pool my bitcoind latency is at 10s. So what?
M
EDIT: I restarted bitcoind, it did significantly reduce getblocktemplate latency. Don't see a big deal here, have to restart things regularly anyhow. Just had to restart cgminer because it went funny on me. Presumably hit the AMD driver time limit.
I've been running with the blockmaxsize and mintxfee setting per above for the last 12 hours and it didn't seem to help. I just added in the blockprioritysize and minrelaytxfee settings and it looks to have made a huge difference.
Went from 5s latency to sub 1s.
Thanks so much Prattler...awesome post!