Virtually all the mining pools I have seen specify a few ports with differing initial difficulties. The difficulty adjusts automatically according to your hash power. I notice that monerohash now offers the ability to set a custom fixed difficulty at a minimum 50000.
What are the benefits of locking down your difficulty? In what circumstances would it be best to opt to specify a fixed difficulty at this value or higher? Would it ever make sense to set it to be lower (hypothetically)?
the pool difficulty is basically how often your miner communicates back to the pool the work it has done. a lower difficulty does fewer hashes before sending results. if the difficulty is too low it will contact the pool too often possibly overwhelming the server, and you may get temporarily banned for spamming the server.
Your hash rate should be around 833 H/s if you have a fixed difficulty of 50k. The guideline is hashrate * 60. The benefit is that on a vardiff (variable difficulty) pool, the share difficulty could dip below 50k. Having a fixed difficulty ensures the shares you submit all have difficulty of 50k.
Whether you benefit from fixed vs vardiff depends on the pool and you just need to test for 7 days to see what your payout average is.
If you set share difficulty at 2k, you would submit more shares but you need to submit 25 shares to equal 50k. Even if the target you solve has a difficulty of 100k, you still only get a share of 2k.
