Version 2.3.1

• Fixed a critical bug that only made SHA-256d mining work correctly with difficulty-1 targets.
• Fixed a compatibility issue with the Stratum implementation in P2Pool ("authentication failed").
• Fixed a bug that only shows up with some Stratum servers (notably the one used by HHTT).
• Added an option to specify a self-signed SSL certificate.

The source code is, as always, available at GitHub. Source tarball and binaries are available at Sourceforge.

cgminer is called from within the batch file. The name of the batch file itself is irrelevant.
This batch file will look like this:
When you want to start cgminer, you start it by running the batch file.

If you don't have problems when running cgminer without having set those two environment variables I suppose you can just ignore them. I can't be totally sure because I haven't used Windows in ages.
Otherwise, make a batch file (a .bat file) where you set the two variables and then call cgminer.

No, GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT and GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS are not cgminer options. Normally on Windows you set them in the batch file you use to start cgminer, on two separate lines. This is described in the document I linked above.

Litecoin mining requires different settings than Bitcoin mining.
All cgminer users should read this document before trying to configure their miners.
The most important points are:

• Set GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT and GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS.
• Set the --scrypt option.
• Tell cgminer how many shaders your GPU has by using the --shaders option.
• Find an appropriate intensity.
• Make sure that no hardware errors occur (all HW figures must stay at 0).

I have found the problem. P2Pool returns a result of null in response to stratum.authorize.
As far as I know, the Stratum protocol specification only defines true and false as meaningful results for that method, and this is why cpuminer 2.3 requires a result of true in response to stratum.authorize.
This should now be fixed in the git repo. The miner now only considers a result of false as an authentication error.

Version 2.3

• This version adds support for the Stratum mining protocol. The miner now recognizes URLs starting with stratum+tcp://, and can also switch from getwork to Stratum if the mining server supports the X-Stratum extension. For those who still don't know, Stratum reduces network resources consumption (only needs one TCP connection), and allows a significant reduction of the stale rate.
• The miner should now automatically set CPU affinity on FreeBSD as it already did on Linux.
• No speed improvements over version 2.2.3.

The source code is, as always, available at GitHub. Source tarball and binaries are available at Sourceforge (I had to switch from GitHub because they've deprecated their Downloads Tab).
Thanks to Tachikoma, we now also have a static 64-bit binary for Mac OS X.

NB: Stratum support does not render the Stratum proxy useless. You should keep using the Stratum proxy when pool mining, unless you only have one miner.

The cpuminer discussed in this thread does not support YAC mining.
You are probably referring to ali1234's fork, which is discussed here.

That reminded me of the barometer question.
Seriously, what you say is true, but is outside the scope of the question, which specifically addressed command-line options.

Those are compile-time flags.

Q: Is there any command-line option I can play with to make cpuminer mine faster?
A: No. (But you can lower the number of threads to make it go slower.)

1. You're in the wrong thread.
2. Don't use Reaper. It's obsolete, buggy and unmaintained. Use cgminer or bfgminer instead.

I wrote the frontend for this pool from scratch back in 2011, so the bugs in MMCFE never affected us.
I did take inspiration from Simplecoin for the GUI, but the actual code is completely different and unique.

The US server had some technical issues; it's back up now.
Tip: You can configure cgminer to automatically switch to the european server if the US server goes down for whatever reason.

Everything looks fine to me, please pm me your details if you want me to check your account.

A DDoS attack has been affecting the website and some of the miners since 1:15 AM UTC.
As usual, if your miners are still hashing you don't have to worry.

Repost from https://www.litecoinpool.org/news?id=45:

By the way, I haven't had much time to work on the pool in the past few days, but I do have plans to let it grow as soon as I'm done implementing a more scalable software solution for the mining backend. I just really want to make sure that reliability and performance are not sacrificed.

EDIT: The scheduled maintenance planned for May 9th has been canceled.

A block every 2.5 minutes is the target average for the whole Litecoin network.
How often a given pool finds blocks depends on the pool's total hash rate.
OzCoin's current rate is about 120 MH/s, which at the current difficulty means that the probability of a block taking more than 10 hours is about 10%, or not at all improbable.
https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=120000&difficulty=437.9378214

It is important to keep in mind that even if a pool finds blocks less frequently because of its smaller size it doesn't mean its users are earning less, as the per-block reward will be higher. The only disadvantage (or advantage, if you're into betting) is that in the short term variance is higher, meaning that you may earn significantly more or less than expected.

Both.

Yes. If you manage to get through to the server despite the attack, you don't have to worry.

The pool is under DDoS attack.

The limit used to be 4 payouts (including 2 automatic ones) every 24 hours; this was changed to just 1 manual payout every 24 hours because automatic payouts are now processed hourly.