Don't? It doesn't make any diff (pun intended.)

Only if the rigs support setting diff with the stratum compliant --suggest-diff that's built into cgminer. However ckpool is very fast at changing diff upwards so I doubt it will really delay in any meaningful way with a start diff of 1k.

I have an awful lot of miners on the pool, most of which are running adhoc rigs of all shapes and sizes - a lot of them lower hashrate older generation hardware that will never make money mining but they run them as a lottery. 1k is fine as a compromise since ckpool adapts so quickly upwards anyway, in less than 30 seconds. If it was the era where you watch consoles which cgminer is running you could see it for yourself, but alas these days it's all hidden behind web interfaces and obfuscation. I've never heard of any rentals, even 8PH ones, having any trouble starting quickly on this pool.

I just tested a S9 I have running on solo right now with a backup pool of Kano.  In console I switched to kano and timed the difficulty adjust.  Diff stayed at 1042 for exactly 60 seconds and then switched to 8.38 K.  Before I had done this test it was running at 10.8K on solo and had been for days.  When I switched back to solo diff quickly dropped down from 10.8K to 4K after only a few minutes of no hashrate.  I understand about the smaller miners but as you said they will probably never make money mining, so why cater to these in-efficient miners?

I have seen entire 300 TH workers disconnect on NH ramp up due to the difficulty not adjusting quick enough.  Large hashrate rentals on MRR are the same way.

X

I understand you wrote the software that is why I am making the suggestion.  It is not hard to ssh into a S7 or S9 and switch pools manually and watch the share submission and time difficulty adjustment.  I can take a video of it if you want I guess...

X

~ck, I like your reference to THGTTG. 

Never in a trillion years. CPU mining is quadrillions of times slower than current hardware miners. You can not meaningfully mine bitcoin with CPU or GPU. You need an ASIC.

But then someone gets lucky and hits a block and the world goes NUTS!!!

But aren't network difficulty and pool difficulty different?