Variance can absolutely KILL you if you get unlucky. The blocks I've found for the pool are only worth 86% of the bitcoins I've been paid by the pool. It seems I got lucky (although I might have gotten lucky mining solo too). I just don't have the stomach to mine for days on end never knowing when I might find a block. One really long unlucky streak will sour you to mining solo.

Also, it's really nice to be able to remotely monitor all your miners with my greasemonkey script (don't forget to donate if it makes your life easier)  

Trying to join the mining pool but having problems. I've set up my account on mining.bitcoin.cz, added a worker for my machine and am running DiabloMiner connecting to http://mining.bitcoin.cz:8332 with the user and password for the worker. However, I keep getting the error message "ERROR: Can't connect to Bitcoin: Bitcoin returned unparsable JSON" from DiabloMiner.

If I inspect the http response from mining.bitcoin.cz it always contains '{"error": {"message": "Error during login, new database lookup in 119 seconds", "code": -129}, "id": "1", "result": null}'

The "seconds" count will tick down on each request, but when it reaches 0 it just starts again at 180 seconds or so.

Can anyone advise on what the problem might be?

I'm running on OS X 10.6.7

Thanks.
Doug

I could definitely be wrong, but I believe that makes a good argument for long polling.

I got an email that 0.55 bitcoin was transfered to my wallet from http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ , that was 2 days ago and it hasent showed up yet??

I see alot of the same as yuancraft recently (past 4 days).
Only for a few second outage, but every second not mined is no btc earned! 

Ditto.

Plus, I'm wondering if these connection problems are seen by the server as disconnects and are negatively affecting our share rates for the new "anti-cheat" payout calculations.

Me also...
Maybe this is way last block took 3:05 hours

Pool will be down for ~15 minutes, I need to upgrade load balancer. Second load balancer will be in failover setup soon, which will prevent such outages in the future. I'm sorry for troubles...

Update: Talking with Linode support, we reached some soft limits on network layer. I'm negotiating rising of those limits, which should fix packetloss and timeouts. Stay tuned...

Good to hear Slush, we love you