I have just restarted the Stratum beta pool, enabling the new dynamic difficulty adjustment. The new system should drastically reduce overhead for large mining farms.
The target rates for miners are between 1 share per 3-10 seconds. If a miner goes beyond 1 share per 3 seconds (during a 5 minute window), that miner's difficulty is doubled. If a miner averages less than 1 share per 10 seconds (in a 5 minute window), it will be halved. A "miner" is defined as a connection to the pool, not an individual worker. In the case of very quick miners, there are shorter time frames (as small as 10 seconds) used for difficulty adjustments, but these require bursts of speed that could not be explained as simply lucky.
The target share rates are still extremely fast, meaning variance should not be adversely affected by this new change. The only issue you may run into with large farms is the per-worker speed (on the BTC Guild website) may vary heavily. However, your total mining speed should stay very close to your actual speed.
EDIT/UPDATE: Another quick restart. The pool now makes sure to send difficulty=1 on a new connection, so a disconnect/reconnect (pool restart for example) scenario doesn't have the miner submitting high diff shares and only getting credit for diff=1.
The target rates for miners are between 1 share per 3-10 seconds. If a miner goes beyond 1 share per 3 seconds (during a 5 minute window), that miner's difficulty is doubled. If a miner averages less than 1 share per 10 seconds (in a 5 minute window), it will be halved. A "miner" is defined as a connection to the pool, not an individual worker. In the case of very quick miners, there are shorter time frames (as small as 10 seconds) used for difficulty adjustments, but these require bursts of speed that could not be explained as simply lucky.
The target share rates are still extremely fast, meaning variance should not be adversely affected by this new change. The only issue you may run into with large farms is the per-worker speed (on the BTC Guild website) may vary heavily. However, your total mining speed should stay very close to your actual speed.
EDIT/UPDATE: Another quick restart. The pool now makes sure to send difficulty=1 on a new connection, so a disconnect/reconnect (pool restart for example) scenario doesn't have the miner submitting high diff shares and only getting credit for diff=1.
Now since Dynamic Difficulty adjustment went live my workers keep getting disconnected/reconnect and only do about 10 or so tasks and then randomly jump to next pool in list.
