Hello, WizKid, et al.,
I'm new to mining, and the pool, and am enjoying both. At least one question has arise in the few days I've been at it that I'd like to understand better:
While my miner is constantly reports running near or over 1 Th/s, the MyEligius stats sometimes report almost 200 Kh/s less work. I understand that some blocks are harder, and the hash slower as a result, but I don't understand why I get different numbers from the miner and from the MyEligius stats. Seems logically they should rise and fall together.
Thanks,
knvsh
The blocks are all the same difficulty.
Your miner is producing hashes at a fairly consistent rate. This is what shows up on your screen.
Most of these results are "easy", i.e. they have a very low difficulty of 0, 1, 2, etc. The network as a whole is looking for extremely difficult hashes: the difficulty required to produce a valid block today is 11,756,551,916.
All of the hashes computed by your miners are valid results that *could* be shared with the pool, but sharing all of your hashes with the pool would eat up your Internet connection and the pool's CPU. So the pool tells your mining software only to share hashes that meet a minimum difficulty level of, say, 16, instead of 0. So you are only sending the pool a small portion of your hashes, rather than every hash. wizkid adjusted Eligius' minimum difficulty for accepted hashes to 128 a couple of days ago. Your miners are far less likely to find hashes of difficulty 128 than they are difficulty 0, 1, or 16. So there is more variability there, and there will be some rounds where your miner doesn't find any hashes of difficulty 128, while there might be other rounds where your miner finds more hashes of difficulty 128 than expected. They will average out in the end.
This is sort of the individual miner's version of "luck" but again, over time your earnings will average out.
It is just necessary to lighten the load on the pool. The pool will automatically adjust your pool difficulty depending on how fast your results are being submitted.