Hi Jay. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing your pool. You did a great job. Unless I'm missing something, however, it just isn't for me.
I understand local cgminer efficiency doesn't mean anything. It's the shares/min that I think is the clincher.
I don't think pool efficiency is as critical as you make it out to be either. I'm at 111.1% efficiency right now, you're at 123.1%.
I don't pretend to understand the math behind how all this works. But I can do simple math, and as they say, show me the money.
As of right now, if p2pool finds a block, I'll get 0.38489903 from my local pool, plus a tiny amount from your pool. Your pool's reward would be 1.77866879.
For me to get the equivalent btc from your pool, I'd have to be 21.65% of the hash rate of your pool. I know your pool has varied a lot today, so this isn't as straight forward as I'm making it out to be, but I think it proves the point.
Right now I'm at 2.1g/h local. You're at 12.1g/h. If I put my 2.1g/h in your pool (which I can't, cgminer always directs 500-1000m/h to me), you'd be at 14.2g/h, and I'd be 14.79% of your pool. Assuming you'd still get 1.78 btc (it'd be higher, I know), I'd get .263 btc. Plus a few almost worthless fractions of other almost worthless currencies.
If I did my math right (and I may be way off somewhere), I'm doing 30% better by mining locally. The merged mining isn't going to come close to compensating for that.
In other words, all things being equal, if I could feed your server as fast as mine, yours would be better because of the merged mining. But I can't.
In summary, unless completely I'm missing something fundamental about this process, the only reason someone should use a pool like yours is if they are right beside it, OR they can't/don't want to setup their own local pool, OR one of the merged mining currencies becomes valuable (and they can't merged mine it locally).
Did I completely miss the ball here?
P2Pmining has the same luck as p2pool. Cgminer is notorious for reporting pool is not serving work fast enough even on the fastest of pool server.
P2Pmining runs on a dedicated server in a datacenter in Florida. It is a Xeon quad core processor with 100mbit link. I don't know why anyone should be having connection issues.
P2Pmining total hashrate does not effect variance or payout for miners using it. Variance is based upon total hashrate of P2Pool.
P2Pmining is a
free P2Pool server
You will always connect faster to a server right next to you than one that is half way across the country.
Efficiency in CGMINER has nothing to do with actual efficiency of the pool. It has to do with the getwork requests vs. submitted shares.
Go to
http://p2pmining.com:9332/static/ and look at efficiency there. That is how well p2pmining is doing vs. the rest of p2pool servers. Currently P2Pmining is at 119.5%. Compare this with your local p2pool server and use the one with the higher efficiency. Server connection to P2Pool nodes is as important as server connection to miners.
Every time I started my miner on p2pmining.com my DOA rate would go up to +10% and then come back down to around 4% indicating that hopping on and off P2Pmining.com would cause higher DOA rates.
The estimated PPS stat is a very rough estimate. It swings above and below the mathmatical pps value (Currently 0.00002884). It just shows how variable luck is.
I hope this helps understand why mining on p2pmining.com is the way it is.
Thanks for playing.