Pardon my ignorance, I have attached the screen shots of cgminer for both of these units
Compac-f
https://imgur.com/Da9dfncI believe the WU tells the diff1 and these are very high compared to 18.
Are you expecting the suggest-diff command to have an effect on the Worker Utility?
In your screen shot it looks like your suggest-diff of 500 is being honored. So that equates to 9.94 shares per minute being submitted to the pool.
What i observed is if I set difficulty too high then no of accepted shares per minute is less compared to the low difficulty setting. So I guess higher the accepted shares per minute mean more chances of calculating/generating best share.
So now I have set difficulty to 1 on both units so that the pool adjust the difficulty to whatever is feasible for the pool, that way I maximize my chances of calculation done per minute by each units.
I may be totaly wrong in my assumption.