Best of Both Worlds
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I hate long blocks, like everyone, and I hate pool hopping, because it never works.
So, here is what I did. Your mileage may vary.
For all my miners, I added ghash.io as a failover pool, Slush is primary.
Then, on the configuration page for the Antminer S3 miners, I changed 'Pool Balance' from Failover to Balance.
Initially this did not work so great, and Ghash was rejecting a lot of shares. After
looking around a bit, the reason became clear. Slush was sending me work with a
difficulty of around 128 +/-, and Ghash was sending me work with a difficulty of
1024. 50% of a S3 is not up to that.
The good news is that Ghash allows you to set the difficulty of your work. So, I went
to the workers section and set all of my miners to 128, then rebooted them all. The
rejections went way down.
Next, I let them run about 10 minutes so Slush could score them, and again updated
their difficulty to match what Slush was using.
All 8 of the S3 miners are now showing about 200 GH/s +/- on both Slush and Ghash.
Perfect.
The Antminer S2 does not have the balance option, but I wanted it to do the same thing.
So I found this link searching on Google:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20992/can-i-set-up-cgminer-to-mine-in-different-pools-by-a-defined-ratioI suppose it will work for anyone using CGMiner, but just tried it on my S2.
I changed the quota numbers to 50 for Slush, 50 for Ghash.
Don't forget to add the last line: "load-balance" : true,
Oh, and on the S2, you will find the config files in /config instead of /etc/config, and the pw is admin, not root like on the S1 and S3.
Anyway, now all 9 miners are balancing successfully between Slush and Ghash. I have 9 legs on a roller coaster and the other 9 on a freight train ... doesn't sound healthy, but so far, so good.
I have 8 S1s and load balance by pointing 4 to slush and 4 to GHash. Seems a lot easier, but thanks for the info.
