Stratum-like support in bitcoind?

[bitcoindaddy]

Is there any way to reduce the amount of network traffic between a miner (cgminer) and a remote bitcoind instance?  Something like variable difficulty or stratum?

Should I run my own pool software on the remote instance that supports stratum, if so, which one?

[eleuthria]

HHTT has open sourced their Java based Stratum server: http://hhtt.1209k.com/sockthing.php
Slush has an open source python based Stratum server: https://github.com/slush0/stratum


I haven't tried either of them.  I don't believe either of them include much in terms of statistics tracking by default, though HHTT's SockThing might(?).