What are factors to consider to choose the best mining pool?

Question

I have seen a lot of parameters regarding each mining pool, but my question is how to consider them when choosing a mining pool:

1. Difficulty
2. Payout threshold
3. Number of miners
4. Geographical location

In particular:

1. Difficulty: how must this be taken into consideration? If difficulty is high, should I mine on that pool only if have have high-end hardware in order to get some profit? And if I mine with high-end hardware (like 6-8 servers with Xeon CPU) on low difficulty what should I expect?
2. Payout threshold: I understand that it is the threshold after which the payment happens. If it takes
3. Number of miners: if it is high the blocks are found faster but the reward is splitted among all.
4. Geography: how much it counts within Europe?

With this question I would like to open a discussion to derive a mining-pool-choosing formula based on these parameters.

Answer 1

1. If the pool has variable difficulty like most pools do mining with high end hardware should not be a problem as the difficulty will adjust based off the shares your hardware submits.

2. If the pool has a high payment threshold for those with low end mining hardware may not be feasible.

3. It should not matter how many miners a pool. It is more to do with hashrate which would increase often a block is found by the pool. The higher the hashrate of the pool the more consistent your payments will be however overall earning should not be affected when averaged out.

4. Your ping to the pool will count as you may submit outdated shares leading to penalties on your earnings so best to stick to pools that are geographically close to you.

That being said the fee which the pool takes is also important to consider as well as trying to keep the network decentralised. My method would be finding a set of pools with low pings as well as fees and then deciding how often you are willing to go without payment, If it is multiple days try to stick with smaller pools to decentralise the network, else you could stick to slightly bigger pools that pay out more often. Finally if your hardware has a low hashrate avoid pools with high payment thresholds.