How could that possibly be answered?  Depends on the attack, the attacker and how difficult it is put up a defense against it.  Don't for a second think that other pools don't go down from attacks, because they do and none are as resilient and stable as Deepbit.

Pool down

Seems to have gone down a little bit ago.  All my miners went idle with connects, disconnects, but no work no matter the state.

They are not any more complex than before, what do you think has made it "more complex"?  Just install and be done with it.  If worried about your wallet [which you should be], copy it aside, or in my case, I just take it as a good time to encrypt and back it up.  I can always recover it and it is a process I do anyway.

Agreed!  He is doing a great job!

Keep in mind that most if not all pools were hit with extended DDOS today and some weathered it better than others.  BTC Guild was essentially down for the count and essentially remains so at well under 50% normal usage.  Slush stayed running I think due to the IP white list (if you don't mind high stale rates due to lack of long polling and score based rounds with 120 confirmation payouts ... you know the drill).  Obviously, I didn't check them all.

Try again now

I should point out that a little bit after the quoted post, perhaps 30 minutes or so, I tried mining with my workstation and things were up and running.  I brought my rigs back online and deepbit is doing just fine.  I think Tycho is doing some good work

It keeps your credentials encrypted at least which makes man in the middle attacks essentially not possible [I suppose if they have the certificate and somehow change DNS records ...].

Hah!  Confirmed my puzzlement over this white listed newbie

Thanks for answering that question for us.

Well he is a newbie, white listed so he must be knowledgeable and in the loop :p

I am half kidding since it seems unlikely that he does, but Eleuthria would surely deny it if this guy is lying, so then, if this guy knows both the attackers and the victims .... then what does that mean?  Or is there a partial truth here?  I can't come to a conlusion about anything posted, except that I can't mine, but I don't really case since the difficulty has made it such that it is not worth the constant babysitting [even if it is still profitable for me if things are running smooth 24/7].  Shutting down all mining equipment and going to normal GPU clock settings on my workstation until this blows over ... or bitcoin blows away.

Because at some point, the only thing in a block will be transactions, which means there will be a lot of them available

EDIT:  Most or all transactions will have a fee at that point as well.

Most definitely or there would never be a wait for confirmations of payouts beyond the end of a round [found block] on deepbit.

<eom>

I wouldn't be offering speculative or investing advise beyond cautionary if I were you.

To the rest of your response, I think you are better off saving the power and dumping the 9800GT altogether, but that is just my opinion.

Just friendly advise.  Do yourself a favor and give up mining with your current hardware; completely.

The more important advice follows.

Do a LOT of research before you even considering putting one penny into bitcoin.  Right now is a rather pivotal time and I would say by far the most dangerous time to considering investing without REALLY UNDERSTANDING WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

I mean this in all kindness, but also I need it to be seen publicly for ALL individuals getting into this market without knowledge.

In my experience, absolutely there will be fewer stale shares.  At least 50% less if not more.  BTC Guild grew very quickly and uses stock, or nearly stock push pool code on each server with some bitcoind modifications of questionable value, and distributes pools around the US and EU and then syncs them up for total pool payout on blocks found.  This has resulted in pool servers becoming overloaded, dropping connections (often 10 or 15 seconds) or leaving the miner without a response for new work [long poll or main RPC call] leaving the miner idle.  I am not trying to knock BTC Guild [I think they are second only to Deepbit when both are running well], so, once that pool is in good shape again [supposedly the weekend of 7/10], you can do more direct comparisons.  Both pools have similar feature sets with BTC Guild taking on a variation on the theme making them different than other pools [just as Deepbit is and was different than other pools when started].  Weigh the options, test a little and decide for yourself .  Personally, Deepbit, over the last many weeks has been by far the most stable pool out there [thus, losses due to idles, outright connection loss, and increased stales from other pools tends to offset the premium 3% fee ... and some people have attacked the fee as too high, but with maximum availability as opposed to other pools, features, etc, this is clearly a working model and "supply and demand" has clearly justified the 3% which I pay without regret].  I don't know how deepbit distributes the servers for the pool [there has to be multiple, right Tycho?], but however it is being done, it is by far the most reliable of any large pool out there.

Last, it is usually a good thing to have accounts at two or three pools to work with; occasionally every book has gone done and every pool has gone down for a significant period of time [even Deepbit, but always recovered better than before and made up for the one time long outage by a large fee reduction which was not required and simply great customer service].  It is also good to, now and then, test the other pools to see what is working for you at any given time [every five day or whatever, connect to another pool for a statistical sampling to determine what your submission rate is, % stale and of course if there are idles or RPC connection issues, so you know whether to reevaluate your primary pool, or more likely, know which is your best backup option should an outage or unstable situation occur].  If your GPU utilization is cycling (due to receiving no work or outright RPC communication failures), in particular enough to cause the temperature to change by more than a couple of degrees frequently, that is a sure sign to run ... it is very hard on your GPU, especially since it is running 24/7 at 99-100% unlike it would for normal gaming [frequent temperature fluctuations, especially a the higher temps of high utlization causes fatigue wear and tear leading to reduced life, likely significant, of the hardware].  Deepbit leaves me with pretty constant GPU usage, and even with a pool restart of something now and then, one blip is a non-issue. 

For me, in spite of my ventures elsewhere, Deepbit remains my pool of choice and is BY FAR the most stable in all respects mentioned above.  Every attempt to mine elsewhere for backup testing has shown deficiencies in the pool within a couple thousand shares per miner, which is what is required to get a reasonable idea of stale rates anyway. 

As usual ... I am verbose 

Are you sure that you were actually getting that speed?  Meaning, were you producing more stales?  Phoenix was rumored to be showing artificially high hash rates, although I cannot confirm this personally.

EDIT:  Add FASTLOOP=false

Fastloop is on by default and while it is not supposed to affect higher aggression levels like it used to, it is better safe than sorry.

Really?  They actually noticed?  How about the "last trade" issue?

Did you look at my post?  Somebody was selling small number of coins, as few as 0.10BTC at $2.99.  Your chances of intentionally buying from this creep are small and the profit of reselling at market price is small ..the largest I think sold was 1.54BTC (as far back in history as I went anyway).

If you want to kill the guy off and snag a few, put a standing buy order out for $2.99 and as many BTC as you have funds in your account  [which I don't trust leaving on that exchange for long].  He'll get sick of losing his bits and ideally MtGox fixes the last trade issue (they probably won't be aware of it for weeks knowing them) since it is almost certain that the last trade would not be for $2.99 for more than a split second with the amount of coins that was asking for $2.99 (0.10-1.54BTC when I looked).

Have you considered branching your releases?  I, for one am always hesitant to run live with HEAD (or TIP, or whatever people refer to it as) code.

Mathematically, it can only be about 3% [although ever so slight variation due to quantum effects, meaning you submit single shares, not partial shares, so there is variation in any given analysis window and also a change in the amount of work dumped or lost as stale when a block changes (the faster the miner, the less stale in a perfect world I think)].

The reason that it has to be about 3% is it was a rearrangement such that fewer computations on the GPU needed to be performed for a given unit of work ... so the performance increase is actually fixed.