If you have 2 pools set, one of them having Long Polling enabled and other not, CGMiner and BFGMiner will use Long Polling info
from former pool to update status of later pool. In screenshot bellow, pool 1 is Coinotron and pool 0 is Terracoin server (soloing).
It happens sometimes that even though miner detected block change via LP, non-LP pool does not switch to new block immidiately.
I don't know much about the whole deal, so I can't tell if user actualy loses few seconds or if LP is not perfectly accurate.
Ahh ok thank you for your reply... a few more pieces in the puzzle
so looking at the output from your miner... at 14:04:27 the pool 1 sent message to your miner to tell it there was a new block detected... and 2 seconds later your pool 0 (solo mining caught up) ... so in this instance there was 2 seconds where you could have mined an orphan block?? or there was 2 seconds where the hashes submitted would not have been counted / valid.....
Anyways it looks like the fact that new blocks are detected by the miner once they are on the blockchain, that the miner will adjust every block for the difficulty... in this respect it makes sense as someone who had been mining since day 1 and not switched off computer will not have advantage mining at lower difficulty rate.. but does mean that anyone mining solo with small hash.. will have small chance of finding a block, and every block (as with BTC atm... ) with something like 24M/Hash you would be lucky to submit 1 hash per block found... so you would be hoping that your hash would be the one to find the block....
Setup i was considering was leaving a computer or two CPU mining for BTC for a year or 10
(sorting out solar /wind electricity b4 getting them running b4 u ask on electricity costs:P) but if the difficulty continues to rise.. surely I will get to the point where I will almost never solve a block if difficulty increases continuously so just not sure if it worth it or not.. but people were talking about mining solo once ACIS hit as better payback if a block is found... just wondered if there was a minimum Hash threshold to difficulty ratio that should / could be applied to see if it worthwhile??
Because if the difficulty is high, do you lose all your work from solo mining when you jump to a pool or does it come with you? Not sure.
From what i read elsewhere.. once you stop solomining... all your work is lost (now i think it is lost every time a new block is detected) but the principal behind the way blocks are found I believe would mean that say you were mining with 95% probability to solve block in 1 hour... and you mined for 1 hour and found nothing.... you were unlucky is what i have heard others say... say you then started back up again and found a block in 5 mins... that time you got very lucky... as far as I am aware the two sessions are not combined or related in anyway... (unless they are mining on the same block??) .... but if this is right then say you mine for 30 min intervals... over 8 hours... stopping for 30 mins between each mine period... so 4 out of 8 hours mined in total... you would have been a LOT better to continuously mine for 4 hours straight rather than 30 min periods?? hmm now i am a little confused as that can't be right??
hmm anyone care to point me at some answers or mistakes i have made with my understanding.. much appreciated for your input crazyrabit and subStrata
