You are correct that websockets could reduce the load as it doesn't require the same frequent polling for new information. However, I don't think any of these pools provides any websocket interfaces today. It's only standard HTTP as far as I know.

Today the minimum profit switching interval is 60 seconds in Awesome Miner, as the profit switching interval can only be set in number of miners. I have received feedback a few times in the past about being able to define the profit switching interval in seconds as well. By allowing the user to specify 30 seconds (that's very frequent), you would also be able to get faster updates from the pools. However, I think it's a quite small gain in updating every 30 seconds compared to 60 seconds - but the best is of course to leave that decision to the user of the software.

Awesome Miner will refresh the pool profitability information before each profit switching. If your profit switching interval is 2 minutes for example, Awesome Miner will connect to Nicehash, zpool and all the other every 2 minutes.

As you also point out, it's not that uncommon that some of these pools are down (at least from an API point of view) some period of times. Awesome Miner will of course fail to update the profit information during that period of time. However, as soon as the pool is responding to the API requests again, Awesome Miner will get the refreshed profit information before the next profit switching check is going to happen. It's generally not a good idea to try again within just a few seconds, because then you just put even more load on the poor server that is trying to recover.

Awesome Miner is also more friendly to the pool API's than some other software. When you have a many miners with Awesome Miner, it's only the main application that request the information from the pools - not each miner. With some other mining software where you don't have any centralized management, I assume each computer doing mining will put load on the pool API's.

If a single pool like zpool is down, it should not affect the statistics updates for all the others as these requests are allowed to fail individually. Based on your report here, I will however do some investigation here to see if there can be any scenario where it isn't working as expected. If you have found any specific way of reproducing it, please let me know. Thanks!

I do like your point about being able to see when the last updates was made. As these are global updates for the pools it should probably not go into the View Details of each miner, but in some application wide "Service Status". It would also be good so see if for example the WhatToMine API is unavailable in a similar way. Also, today you can see if Awesome Miner mark any pool as "Failed" in the View Details dialog. In the same global "Service Status" dialog, it would be good to see a summary of this. Then you can simply open this dialog and get a good understanding of if a few specific Nicehash pools are down, or the Zpool API hasn't been updated for 4 hours and so on.

Are you there ?
To check I used "view details" for the miner and seen that statistics are not being updated as supposed to. Most probably DDOS protection from datacenters denies the API requests to pools statistics because there or too many or simply all pool servers are overloaded by thousands of requests they receive every minute.

It is important to have a retry procedure at a few seconds after failed attempt for all failed or timeout errors from pools statistics until you implement a reliable socket based service.

Remember that pools refresh the statistics every 30 seconds and you can decrease the number of requests to pools from 500 per second (thousands of miners requesting HTTP pool statistics updates) to just one every 10 seconds and after that you can update all 100.000 miners next seconds using sockets. Like that you will decrease pool server load by at least 500 times.

I switched a few hundred rigs I have from Aweosome Miner to Nemos Miner 3.0 because it handles better statistics requests and also I have in Nemos 5 more miners that was not included in Awesome Miner (raven miner , poly, ...)  

What do you think, Patrike ?

What hardware are you using? Mining Dutch uses different stratum ports for low - normal - high difficulty, using too low on highend hardware can cause massive rejection and ban from the pool. On the contrary, using low-end hardware on the higher difficulty ports can result in less accepted shares found given the same mining period.

Also, how often do you profit switch, AM seem to accumulate and not reset accept counter/timer when profit switching, so if you are mining high difficulty coins and didn't submit any shares for 5 min then AM did profit switching, and you were unlucky to find any shares for another 5 minutes after the switch, you will hit your 10min no shares accepted notification time I believe.