Mining workers at mining pools?

[noob_jul11]

I have come across a few pools that one needs to create workers to mine. I don't understand the need for that.

Questions I have:
Should I create different workers for different GPU? Or should I use 1 worker for both GPU? Is it better to have 2 different working on different GPU? What is the purpose of the workers?

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[supersonic3974]

You usually create one worker per GPU.

[supersonic3974]

The purpose of the workers has to do with how the pools are set up I believe.

[The00Dustin]

In my experience, it amounts to personal preference.  If you want to keep track of stuff separate, create multiple workers, otherwise, only create one and point everything to it.  Creating that one worker is the same as some other pool giving you a username and password to use.

[x0Jakeyboy0x]

This also allows for pools within pools to be created by other users.

[noob_jul11]

That means it has no effects whether i have 1 worker with 2 different gpu in the same pool versus 2 workers with 2 different gpus in the same pool?

[The00Dustin]

That means it has no effects whether i have 1 worker with 2 different gpu in the same pool versus 2 workers with 2 different gpus in the same pool?

As far as I can tell, however, someone might chime in later on and tell us that each worker at their pool gets a different group of hashes, meaning multiple miners on one worker leads to a possibility of stale shares.  I can't say that I know one way or another.  The first pool I used said I needed to create a worker and I could use as many miners as I wanted on it, but didn't provide any technical info for or against doing it that way.

[Telsin]

Particularly on the pools that offer notification of idle miners, one GPU per worker looks like a good organization tool.

[The00Dustin]

I was just looking into long-polling, and according to http://btcmine.com/page/help/#registration, "Using separate miner logins and passwords for each miner instance you are running is absolutely necessary for proper long-polling support."

EDIT:  And now I found this: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16619.0
That says deepbit can long poll with 10 connections per worker, so I guess it just depends on your pool, but only if you're using a miner with long-poll support.