Looks like latest confirm problem is fixed. I sure would like an official "hey we are still here" post from slush though. I don't like that there doesn't seem to be any communication channel to the pool operators when there is a problem.

How often does Slush's pool pay after reaching your payout amount?  Just curious.

I'd love to see manual setting of diff as an option again.

Anything below 2.3Ghash pointed to slush and you'll keep getting sent diff 1 shares. Of the other pools I've looked at 2 is set as the bare minimum.

Your miner is not sent shares of any difficulty - in fact, it is not sent shares at all.  It is allocated new work every so often, and told by the pool what difficulty of result is acceptable.  When it calculates a result whose difficulty matches or exceeds that threshold, then the result is sent, and you are credited with a number of shares equal to the threshold difficulty.

Let's say you are mining with a GPU producing on average four results per minute.  Some of those will probably be rated diff 1.  Slush has set your threshold to 1 (as it's so slow) so each of those results is accepted and earns one share.  If you were able to set your own threshold, as used to be the case, any results below the threshold you set would not be sent and thus ignored.  You might then go a minute or more and earn nothing, even missing out completely on some very short rounds where you might otherwise have had at least one or two shares.

You now upgrade to a faster miner, producing around 150 results per minute.  Slush will quickly adjust your difficulty threshold higher, aiming to receive around 20 results per minute.  Let's say it's raised to 4 - then your miner will only send results with a diff of 4 or more, and you will be credited with 4 shares per result.  Higher, but fewer of them.

In all cases the work allocated is the same: it's just the difficulty of the accepted results that varies.

The whole point of this being done automatically is that it optimises the rate at which your results are sent, preventing the server being stressed by excessive traffic, and using less of your internet connection bandwidth, while maintaining your share generation rate.  This latter can be important, for at busy times your connection speed may vary widely, and you might find that your hash rate slows down noticeably; reducing the traffic sent may limit the damage.

Do you take Slush's share rate setting as a disadvantage? The lower the accepted difficulty setting, the lower your variance.

And in case of the Slush's scoring algorithm, one has to have a bit higher shares per minute, as only the latest shares submitted have some significant value. Thus one gets effectively less shares for the accounting (only a part of the shares submitted in the round, which makes the round effectively shorter), and for maintaining the same level of precision and keeping the variance reasonably low, one has to increase the share rate by some amount.

Exactly right. But at 2-2.5Ghash it's possible to exceed 100 shares a minute (or I guess I should say 'when it's passing off the lowest difficulty results one can be credited with more than 100 shares a minute' ) Here is a a snippet from about half an hours worth;

Reject ratio: 0.1%
 Items worked on: 2513
 Discarded work due to new blocks: 133
 Stale submissions discarded due to new blocks: 0
 Unable to get work from server occasions: 0
 Submitting work remotely delay occasions: 0
 
I still reckon it would be a nice touch and would help mitigate the problems you listed above. Some people aren't in a position to decide they'll just point 3 at it to save bandwidth and latency issues.

As an aside it was good to read your concise write up.

Yeah I grok that. But being on a pissy wireless broadband plan that's sometimes painfully slow (especially mid morning) along with capped downloads so low I don't even want to go there, it surprised me 1's were still accepted at those hashing speeds. I did end up going back to 3 which put's me at diff 2 again but oh well it was just a suggestion.

I've been many hours over my threshold (which is below the 0.05 value in the FAQ), it is now almost 3 times my threshold but still no payout... Slush has been 'consistently inconsistent' with the payout regime, although it always happens eventually, but the delays are frustrating and unjustified 

Same here.  Cgminer had some message that it lost connection to the pool, now it sits on diff 3 (which is probably not the right one for a 20GH/sec miner) 

Well yesterday was a wash with that long block on slush ..then that was resolved..and due to extreme cold in the Midwest USA
charter Inet went poof for like 6 or 7hrs...and then the China announcement and btc down trend..sheesh.....had the day off
decided to stay in..likely  a truck shooting around trying to run me down or some such if I go out

did that .00027 or whatever it was block ever get fixed or once confirmed it is a done deal even if maybe in error"

thanks

Searing