Solving a bitcoin block is basically a lottery - the first pool to return a valid hash of difficulty greater than or equal to the difficulty level "wins" the block.   Since there are multiple pools (and solo miners) each time one of them solves a block and returns it, everyone has to start over attempting to solve the next block, and the lottery starts all over again.     

Yeah, one round is the length of time it takes for our specific pool to find a new block.  Can take 6 minutes sometimes and 6 hours others.  Our luck has been bad today unfortunately =(.  You're correct!  The more people hashing away, the greater the probability of our pool finding a new block. The reward however is lessened and distributed amongst more miners.

I'm new here and to mining so maybe a n00b question but why does Slush's pool consistently show a lower average hash rate then my cgminer readout?

It was correct up until I got above 9gh now @ 12gh slush's pool consistently reports 10gh-11gh... cgminer has it @ 11.95 to 12.3 @ all times while the 5s average has a big swing in which the lowest hash rate seems to be the one recorded as THE average on slush's pool.

Normal?

Slush, Is there any problems with the pool? Im getting high pings and its not on my end.  It causes my miners to go idle very frequently. Ive done a quick trace route and output is below. Looks like on last 7 hops are around 100ms which is too high.

Could you look into that please?


 
  3    11 ms     8 ms     8 ms  popl-bb-1b-ae9-0.network.virginmedia.net [82.14.
127.245]
  4    17 ms    11 ms    12 ms  nrth-bb-1b-et-710-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.
253.175.57]
  5    10 ms    11 ms    11 ms  tele-ic-4-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.
174.18]
  6    11 ms    12 ms    12 ms  be3000.ccr21.lon02.atlas.cogentco.com [130.117.1
4.141]
  7    16 ms    15 ms    15 ms  te0-0-0-25.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [130.1
17.0.97]
  8    14 ms    15 ms    14 ms  te0-5-0-3.mpd22.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54
.74.54]
  9    88 ms    87 ms    87 ms  te0-7-0-33.ccr22.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [130.1
17.0.46]
 10    91 ms    92 ms    95 ms  te7-8.ccr02.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43.
14]
 11   100 ms    97 ms    99 ms  te3-8.ccr01.buf02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.42.
241]
 12    99 ms   108 ms   102 ms  38.122.36.46
 13   110 ms   106 ms   107 ms  host.colocrossing.com [192.3.8.58]
 14   100 ms   100 ms    99 ms  198.23.162.126
 15    99 ms    99 ms    98 ms  192.198.107.178

Trace complete.

Just check the graph?

I use multiple mining programs on different machines.  I wonder if running stratum-mining-proxy on one machine then pointing all the miners to it would be the most efficient.  I notice when I do, minepeon will ignore my --no-stratum in the miner.conf and switch to stratum+tpc and use stratum thru the stratum-mining-proxy.  Is this a mistake?  If each of the miners have stratum included would it be most efficient to point each miner at Slush's pool stratum address?  Stratum-mining-proxy was needed when I was using BTCMiner.

I had supposed it was a cache of potential work.

I'm trying another, bigger pool for a few days to see how different my daily income would be. So far in 18 hours out of 24 hours I have made same amount that I make in full 24 hours with slush. My payments per round are smaller but rounds are faster so ultimately it should be the same or only a little higher. I haven't seen a 4 hour round all day today with this pool.

Probably will return to slush because that's where I started and have gotten tons of support here.

Thanks, yes.

Pool luck is falling...did someone break a mirror yesterday