The average amount of time (in seconds) to find a single share is:


In that equation, difficulty is the difficulty of a share and hashrate is your hash rate in hashes per second.  A day has 86,400 seconds in it, so the number of shares you'll find in 24 hours is:

It's time for prop pools to go away.  Prop pool dedicated miners and pool operators have been largely choosing to ignore the unfixable flaw inherents in proportional payouts.  It's time to come to grips with reality and switch to a non-hopable payment scheme.

The second URL was "how would 1000 BTC be divided up between p2pool miners".  4.43964579 means that you would have received 4.43964579 BTC out of the 1000 BTC.  Of course no one would likely donate 1000 BTC   I just picked a very large number to make sure that no one would fall below the 0.01 cutoff.

Do you see your address in the output of:  http://forre.st:9332/patron_sendmany?total=1

How about in the output of: http://forre.st:9332/patron_sendmany?total=10000

If you address is in the second one but not the first one, then I believe that is because of the small miner lottery.  

In order to prevent lots of tiny payments, the donation code takes all the people who would have received only a very small donation payment, adds up all those payments, and awards the entire amount to one of those small miners randomly.

"Small Miner" depends on the size of the donation.  If someone is donating 1 BTC at a time and the pool hashrate is 200GH/s, and the small payment cutoff is 0.01, then you have to have approx 2GH/s to not fall into the "small miner" bucket.  If someone donates 10 BTC in one fell swoop, then you only need to have 200 MH/s in order to be above the 0.01 payment cutoff.

P.S.  The default cutoff is 0.01, but people doing donation can choose a different one by adding it to the URL with a '/'.  For example, here is a 1 BTC donation with a 0.001 cutoff instead:

http://forre.st:9332/patron_sendmany?total=1/0.001

No, I have gotten several in the past few days.

You can copy out of the cmd window, but it is annoying.  Talk to Microsoft if you want it fixed (it has nothing to do with p2pool):

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/windows_dos_copy.mspx?mfr=true




As someone mentioned, p2pool sends work to cgminer at a low difficulty but only some of them count as real shares in p2pool.  That is why p2pool and cgminer disagree and it is normal.  Real p2pool shares have a high difficulty and you won't find very many of them:

gribble: The average time to generate a block at 610000 Khps, given the supplied difficulty of 375.328335592, is 44 minutes and 2 seconds

Of course that is an average and just like normal bitcoin blocks, it may sometimes take 3 hours to find a share and other times only 10 minutes.

Last, 10 peers is not abnormal, especially if you just recently restarted.  You client does not connect to all peers on the network, only a handful.  If you have any incoming (it lists them), then you know your   firewall is configured correctly.  If you have no incoming peers and have been running p2pool for more than a day or two, then probably your firewall is not configured correctly.  It doesn't really matter that much though.  

The blue and the red parts are showing the same information in different ways:

Total submitted shares: 180 valid + 8 orphan + 5 dead = 193.
Stale % = (8 orphan + 5 dead) / 193 total = 0.067 = 6.7%

But it is the red part that tells you what kind of problem you have (orphan vs dead).

Of course, these numbers are only useful after p2pool has been running for a few days.  They start out at zero everytime you restart p2pool and for the first day or two, randomness will make it hard to know what the real pattern is.

Look for these line in the p2pool output:

2012-02-01 13:25:32.973102 Pool: 147GH/s in 17310 shares (17314/17314 verified) Recent: 1.39% >2045MH/s Shares: 180 (8 orphan, 5 dead) Peers: 39 (29 incoming)
2012-02-01 13:25:32.973229 Pool stales: 8% Own: ~7% (4-12%) Own efficiency: ~101% (95-103%)

The red part tells you how many and what kind of stales you are getting.  The blue part tells you how that compares to the pool as a whole.

Share difficulty is set so that they will be found every 10 seconds on average.  Just as with bitcoin blocks (which are supposed to be found every 10 minutes but are often found 2-3 minutes apart or 25 minutes apart), there will be variance in how frequently the shares are actually found.

An average of 1 share per minute would be accomplished by making share difficulty 6x higher.  That would increase variance for any given miner (which seems to be the opposite of what you are looking for).

Given the pool's current/recent hashrate, our average time to find a block should have been about 10-11 hours.  So in the past 96 hours, we should have found 9 or 10 blocks.  In reality we have found 9 blocks in that time frame.

So, we are pretty much hitting the average.  You should have made almost exactly the same amount in the past 4 days as you would have on a PPS pool unless your share-finding-luck has been crazy bad.  If you really have seen only 1/3rd as much, something almost has to be wrong because you almost certainly haven't been that unlucky finding shares. 

Have you confirmed that your stale rate is not abnormally high relative to the pool? 

Are you getting approx the same hashrate as before as reported by p2pool?

Yes

I run a single rig with 5 GPUs and phoenix and get about 5% reject.  Check your AGRESSION option.  It needs to be lower for p2pool in order to get lower stales.  I was getting 20-30% as well and dropped the AGRESSION from 9 down to 7 and reject rate dropped like a rock.  I don't know why this is necessary, but it seems to be.

The found-block directly includes the appropriate payments in the coinbase (the transaction that generates the 50 BTC).  Instead of the 50 BTC going to one address, it goes to all of the addresses of people that have mined shares in the last N shares (usually 8640) relative to how many shares they have mined.

See here for an example:

http://blockchain.info/block-index/856135

(see the "No Input (Newly Generated Coins)" transaction)

Where can I find these graphs?  The ones I found (at http://mymachine:9332/graphs/) don't show individual workers.

You can't.  I added it to btcstats.net for myself only as it gets its data on my hashrate from my personal proxy.  I suppose I could try to figure out how to find other people's hashrates from the p2pool RPC api if people wanted it, but I don't think you can put images in signatures anymore, so it would be kind of pointless except at other websites (it works for me here only because I haven't changed my sig since the new rule went into affect). 

Someone else made a nice looking avatar image (that you can put under your name in the left sidebar).  Scroll up for the details.

I pointed my modest setup at p2pool.  It wasn't too painful.  We'll see how it goes.

Looks great now (0.6%):

FYI, my stales are back down to 2.4% (calculated locally, over the past 3 hours):



My Workers round count (over the past 4.2 hours) is showing closer to 0.3% stale:



Not sure why the discrepancy.  I'm going to try us2 overnight to see if it makes a difference.

I am seeing about 4.4% rejects also.  Note, this is a moving 3 hour average (so does not include last nights futzing) and is calculated on my end (not based on the stats you are calculating on the web page).

On the My Workers page, the Profitability column is cool, but I find myself constantly doing the same math exercise every time I go there to add up all the rows to get the total profitability for my account.  Any chance of just adding a subtotal to the bottom row for that column that added up the numbers above?