I don't suppose you could post some info about hashrate vs auto diff?
i.e. roughly what hash rates will get what diff values?
Just curious - thanks

yes, 18 shares per minute on auto, though users can choose 1 - 10,000 if they feel they need something different

What are some guidelines for the user defined diff?

i hate to sound newbish, but i'm unclear on variable difficulty's benefits. my understanding is it basically allows miners with higher then common hashrates to makethe work harder on themselves and earn less as a result. is that correct?

if so - then i am much less concerned about it... i have a massive 280 mhash here... sigh.

interesting. good to know when i get me some asics.

in looking at what other pools were doing and after talking to ckolivas 18 seemed a reasonable number

earn the same as a result
but use much less network traffic to do it
we are also finding miners on stratum (using VarDiff or not) are getting substantially lower stale rates
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That is most certainly what I have seen.

I have almost exclusively used Ozco but about 2 weeks ago I moved over to BTC Guild to try Stratum , there was such a drop in Stales and it was so stable that I stayed there until Graet got Stratum working on Ozco then I shifted back. Stratum also seems to work better on hi latency or dodgy internet connections.
What is a piss off to me is that after many months both my machines are now working better than ever, they are stable, reliable and quite slick, but after the reward halving I will no longer be profitable mining BTC and I like many others will be forced to move over to LTC mining fulltime.
My question is, can Stratum be adapted to LTC Mining and if so, would Stratum help with reducing the higher rate of stales and rejects you get with LTC mining?



[/quote]
not until a litecoind equivalent to bitcoind 0.7.x is released in my understanding

What I take from the responses so far is, that it is likely that, given Litecoind 0.7.x. Stratum could be implemented for LTC mining.
The real question is. Opinions? if it was implemented, would it actually have any effect in reducing the stales and rejects on LTC mining.

The server stratum.ozco.in is hosted on needs to be rebooted for maintainence needs
I estimate mining will be down for ~5minutes in ~3 hours time (3pm UTC)
sorry for any inconvenience
Graet

I'm at work, but it looks like the new CGMiner reconnected with no issues. Great Success!