Optimal pool switching time for max profit

[CreamyG31337]

Considering the effects of PPLNS, how often should you be switching pools for maximum profit?

If you enable managed profit switching in 'awesome miner', 30 minutes is the default for how often it re-calculates profit and switches. You can also configure the % it will consider being an improvement -- 1% is the default.

I assume there are lots of other software and scripts to do this, or you could just refresh coinwarz / whattomine a few times per day and manually change things up.

It looks like the 'interval' setting for NemosMiner is the equivalent setting -- 120 seconds is the default.

If you don't mind, show your 'work' in an example from your favorite pool and coin.

ex:
hashvalult.pro appears to find a sumokoin block every few hours on average, so if you're going to mine there, probably 2-3 hours would make sure your work is properly credited.

hashvalult.pro appears to find an electroneum block every few minutes on average, so if you're going to mine there, probably 10 minutes would make sure your work is properly credited.

zpool.ca mines 9 different neoscrypt coins. They have enough neoscrypt hashing power to find a block of whichever is the most profitable coin in 5 minutes or less, so it might be safe to mine here less than 10 minutes at a time. Of course it takes 30 seconds to switch pools and start mining, maybe longer for full speed, so it might be inefficient anyways, at least for some algo's.

If you need an explanation of PPLNS feel free to google "what is pplns" and read the explanation on give-me-coins.com

As a miner, how do we find out what the 'N' is in 'Pay Per last N Shares'? Is there a proper formula or do pool operators customize this? I know it's *based* on difficulty, but it's hard to set this up properly when you don't know the actual number.

[puwaha]

It's a tradeoff.  If you set it too low (under 10 mins) then you will be wasting time during the switch.  Depending on the miner software, it can take a minute or two to really ramp up and stabilize.  At 10 minutes, and a 1 minute ramp up, you will be losing up to 10% of the time you could have been mining.  If you set it too high, then you miss the change of the "most profitable" coin on the multi-pool.  You would be mining a coin for some period of time where it won't be as profitable.