Do mining pools offer steady hash mining rates?

[glendall]

Hi guys. Pretty new to mining.

Question:  does your hash rate generally fluctuate very much when mining in a pool? Is that normal?  i.e can you expect to mine at your card's max at a steady rate, or does it go up and down a lot ?

For an experiment I joined a 7950 to the Pool-x.eu LTC pool. It is a dedicated mining PC.

My mining rate is all over the place. I'm trying to figure out the issue. I think it is network communication to the pool that is messing stuff up, but not sure. For example, over the last 4 hours of mining, my rate was steady at ~600 k for the most part, but had 2 dips of about 10-15 mins to half that hashing rate.   6 hours ago, I had a dip all the way down to 50 KH/s . 

Is this normal pool behavior ? If not, should I look at joining a different pool, or look towards my own set up for the problem?

[1715502033]

1715502033

[1715502033]

1715502033

[1715502033]

1715502033

[MashRinx]

Your hashing rate will have some variables tied to it.  A pool doesn't know your hashing rate but estimates it based upon the number of shares that your machines has submitted over a period of time.  The luck of finding hashes will fluctuate, but I have found my rate of hashing to be relatively stable over time.

Pool connectivity and the pool's ability to keep up with the shares being submitted may also be a factor, but I've not been on the pool's side so I can't speak to all of those variables.  I would suggest trying another pool or two for a certain period of time and see which works out best for you, but keep in mind the shorter those test, the more variance there may be.  Also, don't confuse (and not suggesting you are) your hashing rate with the overall rewards from the pool.  The luck and variance of finding a block will play a role there as well.

I know that rate I expect to see my hardware mining at and will keep an eye on each machine to see if it's drops below an expected threshold.  When it does, I check out the machine to make sure all cards are hashing as expected, that my miner software hasn't locked up, etc.

Good luck!

[glendall]

Thank you very much for your response. The detail is appreciated

Also found (didn't realize) that there are  graphs of that show both personal, and total pool,  production (available in the web portal) . So by checking that was also able to verify that the dips were pool-wide and not just for me.

I think I'm going to try my luck in a different pool as this one does not seem very steady (currently the entire pool-x.eu pool is actually down and has been for about an hour.)

[cryptodrifter]

Also note, that some pools have been under ddos.

[glendall]

Maybe that's it then.

I really like the portal for this pool. Has great graphs and is informative and well laid out. But hasn't been very steady...

Didn't realize mining pools were targeted by DDoS attacks.  Boy that's lame. Not too surprising; but lame nonetheless...