It takes 24 hrs to reach full mining potential because reward is distributed based on shares submitted in the past 24 hours. Mine for at least a week before making any decision to account for variance.
Does the pool still use the standard p2pool PPLNS?
Also where is this server located now?
sub 40ms ping times from Arizona
sub 50ms ping times from California
P2pmining PPLNS is set up to distribute the reward from p2pool prportionally to shares submitted in the last 24 hours.
P2pool PPLNS is a little more complicated. Here what is stated in the wiki
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2PoolEach share contains a generation transaction that pays to the previous n shares, where n is the number of shares whose total work is equal to 3 times the average work required to solve a block, or 8640 (= 24 hours of shares), whichever is smaller. Payouts are weighted based on the amount of work each share took to solve, which is proportional to the p2pool difficulty at that time.
So p2pmining pays PPLNS based on the reward of another PPLNS. Can any one figure out ramifications of this system?
By the way, I have no idea where the server is. vedalken254 would need to answer that.