Once switched to Stratum my utility numbers in cgminer have dropped quite a bit.
THe "U" variable SHOULD drop under Stratum. The U number is purely: Work submitted per minute. Since the difficulty is scaled to approximately one work unit per 4-6 seconds, you should see U floating between 10 and 15 on Stratum. Even less if you're using the proxy (in the case of the proxy, your U would be equal to 10-15 if you combined all of your hardware). This is not the case if the proxy is not being run with -rt (real-target), in which case the proxy doesn't give your cgminer the full difficulty, and instead hides the fact that lowdifficulty shares are never being sent to the pool.
Stratum is [at minimum] twice as efficient from a raw connection standpoint, since it doesn't have one hanging connection (LP) + "one" connection being opened/closed nonstop for work submission/requests. It's actually more efficient since HTTP KeepAlive is not even close to as efficient as a single raw socket. Additionally, the new Stratum pool server is coded in C++ over Java, which is showing massive improvements in both CPU and memory utilization.
From a bandwidth/processing power standpoint, it's not even close. Stratum blows getwork away.
Seems to be working.
Correct, with native client support, you do not need to use the proxy. In the future, large farms would benefit from using the proxy just to reduce overhead even further. A single stratum connection per miner is around 0.5 KB/s (4 kbps) of bandwidth. It's a bit less, but that's a high-end approximation. If you had a farm of 100 individual mining clients, you'd be 400 kbps (again, probably more like 200 kbps, but using worst-case scenario). A proxy for those 100 clients would reduce bandwidth back down to 4 kbps for your entire farm.
Thanks! All great info. I just want to make sure I'm ready for the ASIC's and have the "farm to pool" configured for optimal settings.