Topic: Help me pick a mining pool (Read 1034 times)

Don't most pools treat that like pool hopping, and if you only contributed at the beginning of a block, you don't get anything at all?

Also, does it switch back to your main pool once it is back up? Or does it stay on the failover pool until you tell it otherwise?

everytime a new block is found the pool has to tell you to work on this new block

if it takes slush 100ms more to tell you... you are wasting 100ms on an old one

that adds up... at least 7 minutes a month of wasted time   (may not sound like a lot)


best thing you can do is set up failover pools in CGminer, so if one pool goes down, you mine
on a different one automatically.... many times ive woken up and seen my miner has been
idle for 4 hours beause the pool went down and i didnt have a backup

bitparking I get 44ms and slush I get 143ms. Does that really make a big difference?

Try Slush.
If you have any concerns or doubts, you may also try Slush

I don't know what rates Eligius are paying, but last time I looked these were the rates per share:

50BTC = 0.00000316
Deepbit = 0.00000293
BTC Guild = 0.00000310

What is the advantage of 50btc over eligius?

I started mining bitcoins for the first time back in January, and based on my research I had made the determination that eligius would be my best choice. Right now my mining works like this: A radeon 5750 and a 7850, both overclocked, on two separate machines, with a combined hash rate of roughly 550Mh/s. I didn't buy these cards for mining, rather they are cards for gaming that I already had, so I figured I would experiment with mining, and so far I like the results. However lately I keep running into this:

https://i.imgur.com/SqxRI0V.png

Naturally, I'm not getting anywhere if my client can't actually participate in the mining process. I did research on p2pool and I heard something about variance being no good. My statistics page here doesn't seem to indicate that I am doing that well on eligius though:

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1MxuKm4jdpGqpUSJRE45gbanGsePEkRJnq

Many of the dips are from suspending the mining while I play games, but I haven't played any games at all in the last two weeks. My network works fine (I am a network engineer btw) as I do regular SLA testing (hobby of mine) and there are no ISP connectivity issues indicated by that, nor do I notice any downtime from any other sites.

I realize that it is basically impossible to accurately predict how much you'll actually be able to mine. However, is there at least any statistic gathering anywhere that will give me an idea if I'll get better results from another pool?

I'm currently on a PPLNS pool, which basically means I get paid a percentage of each block based on how many shares I contribute over a 24h period. This works well for me, because all my mining machines are in constant operation 24/7.

If you're not mining all the time, then for you it might be better to be on a PPS pool where you are paid per share. Good ones to try are 50BTC, Deepbit and BTC Guild. At the current difficulty, with 500mhps you might get $130 a month if you mine continuously. Less if you take breaks for gaming etc. I guess you have to weigh that up against how much you pay for power.

I think 50BTC have one of the best rates for PPS at the moment.

Hope that helps