Should I switch Pools?

[gyzer]

I've been mining at BTC Guild for almost 3 weeks now. I've seen it grow very fast up to its current 2.5Thash/second. I notice that my earned btc's per share have significantly decreased, from about .015 -.019 to .008 -.012. This started happening way before the difficulty increase that happened last night.

Now I know that when more people join a pool the amount you get from the shares you produce goes down, but then the time per round should decrease (with the exception of luck) so that you should still be making close to what you were making before. I had highs of .75 btc per 24 hours with lows of .48 per 24 hours before BTC Guild reached 2.5Thash and now I'm seeing about .47 to .50.

I'm currently running at around 500-550mhash/sec with two 5830's.

I know this also has to deal with luck but I'm wondering, is there a point when a pool gets too big that people who are producing on the lower end of mhash/sec should move on to a different pool who is not as big? Is there some breaking point where the math shows that joining a smaller pool is better then staying with one of the big pools?

[Synaesthesia]

Earnings per share go down, but they solve blocks more frequently, so you get paid more often. It all balances out.

[teflone]

Personally, im not far off you, but I do notice a diff.

I know its supposed to even out, it does, but I SWEAR theres a perfect balance where you make the most and earn it quickly (block solved)

1.6 - 2.2 terra hash pools seem to make the most for me...

[piggybank]

The most important part is to make sure you're not getting timeouts etc.

BTC Guild was terrible for this a couple of weeks back (although much better now). My rough calculations seemed to indicate that at points I was 20% down on what I should have been mining.

Make sure you've got two miners running per card with one pointing at another pool such as Deepbit (whcih I've never had bad problems with timeouts....)

As for the payout per block, yeap it's going down, but BTC Guild is now solving about 50 blocks a day, compared to about 10 a day when I first joined.

So it all evens out, as long as your not getting timeouts!

[einsteinx2]

Also a few days ago btcguild got really lucky and solved a bunch of blocks in a really short period of time. If you are counting that day as your high day, then all days after will look like substantially less. That was pure luck though. It was the day that bitcoincharts.com showed like 15 thashes/sec of processing power on the network (not actually 15, but that's how fast the blocks were solved). At least for me, btcguild was steady the whole time besides that lucky day.