I have been considering the load that miners typically place on a pool, and started wondering whether it might be possible for a pool operator to give users the option to tweak how high the difficulty is in shares they receive.
For instance, most pools (all?) spit out shares that are difficulty 1 for each request. However, newer technology has greatly increased the speed with which such a share can be solved, and the number of getworks might be more and more of a problem for pools to deal with in a cost effective manner.
So, what I would like to know is whether it would be possible for the poolop to place a configurable selection in the worker configuration to raise the difficulty of shares sent to the worker, perhaps as high as say 10. This would reduce server load, and I wonder if it could increase efficiency as well.
Any ops care to comment on whether a) is this a good idea, and b) technically even possible?
EDIT: I might also add that this could have positive benefits in high latency and low throughput networks such as Tor.
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