My mining speed has decreased during the day just the last two days

[kidtriton]

I've got 15 block erupters running in one instance of cgminer that for weeks has held a pretty solid 4900-5050MH/s rate into 50btc, doing about 4200 shares an hour.  My Internet bandwidth is 30/2Mbit advertised and seems to live up to those numbers.  

So just the last two days during the ~ 7am - 7pm time frame my reported speed in the pool shows to slow down to the 4600MH/s range (cgminer still shows 5GH/s) but my 60 minute earned share average is definitely falling.  I know how the pools say to base hash speed off the miner stats and not the pool reported speed, but I'm only getting in around 3600 earned shares at these times.  

I do have a difficulty of 1 set but never experienced bandwidth/pool connection problems in the past.  Should I attribute this to needing to up my difficulty level?  Since my speed came back up to 5GH/s last night but has fallen again by almost 1G first thing that comes to mind is packet loss or connectivity problems on my end but I just remoted into a server I have running at home (from work) and everything seems fine with my connection.  

So is the consensus going to be that I need to up my difficulty setting in order to cut back the traffic and see how it goes from there?
 

[miter_myles]

I'm actually noticing this too on my setup.. odd.. using the latest cgminer 3.4, going into BTCGuild.  (Win7. 64bit)

I had some hubs going into a main hub back to the PC.. for giggles... switched it to daisy chain last night.. no change..

[kidtriton]

Like right now cgminer says 5025MH/s and the dashboard on 50btc says my 60 minute average is 4119 with 3452 shares earned in the last 60 min.  I know how they say to go by the miner app speed but if I really was doing 5GH/s my 60 min shares would be between 4100-4200.  So it seems like something's getting lost between me and them. 

[Trongersoll]

does the pool's hashrate increase during that period?

[kidtriton]

Haven't paid attention to the total rate of the pool during the slowdowns but this morning it was already slow when I woke up (only making .0011 per hour instead of the .0015 I can get with 5G and this 65Mil difficulty) so I switched over to BTC guild for the day and every time I've checked in its shown 5000-5100MH/s and the number of shares and earnings back up these numbers. 

I'm going to switch it back to 50btc and see what it does.