Makes sense to mine small amounts of hash and spread it around-given an alotted amount otherwise, you will be effectively mining against your own high difficulty (how ironic) and also the getwork from the network is not keeping up with your end.
(this is argument against quantum computers btw, basically they can't get new work in and out quick enough to process, entry/exit bottlenecks, lol)
Right on; I spread it between 5 area's and did 100MH/s on each node that reported a different block, and this didn't really work. So I put the 1GH on a PPS and it yielded almost twice as much but it took nearly 3 days to pay out everything, even on blocks that I didn't mine on, it essentially took 75% and divided it up between ~30 blocks so I essentially got 2.5% for several days even thought I mined on 1- 1.5 block(s) the PPS system is either incredibly fair or is more attractive to someone with higher hash rate since a block may not be solved in 2 or less hours, or both.
In contrast mining 500MH/s for 12 hours on PPNLS (P2Pool) came to roughly the same amount as 1GH/s for 45 minutes(3 days payout) on PPS, the cost effectiveness is cheaper for 1GH burst, but 1GH for 1 hour on P2Pool was around 50%+ less.
PPLNS
500MH/s 12 hours/1 pool (P2Pool) = ~4.5 Dash
100MH/s on 5 different pools 12 hours (P2Pool) = ~3.75 Dash
1GH on 1 P2Pool for 1 hour = 0.56
11 MH/s 24 hours (P2pool) = 0.45
PPS
11MH/s 24 Hours PPS = 0.27
500MH/s 24 Hours PPS = 18.7
1GH for 1 Hour PPS = (2.59 Day 1) (3.97 Day 2) (5.44 Day 3)
1GH for 12 Hours PPS = 14.97
1GH for 24 hours PPS = 24.12 <- This number is slightly lower because by the 14-15 hour mark the difficulty was almost 4k the nounce was 4 million, the payout was about 2.5 per block and I was asked in an email around the 12 hour mark to spread my hash power out, I didn't get the email until I got home and at some point 20 hours in my miner was on a temporary ban (less than 2 hours).
So overall this was about 70 Dash or $182 USD and the cost of the test was 170 +/- I made 5 dash after covering cost to run or ~$13USD, it's more efficient to mine at less than 20MH/s on one node by my numbers. Keeping difficulty around 2500 or less and a block worth of 4.5 or more, 2 GTX 980's @ 21 MH/s and just under 400 watts at average difficulty is where the profit hits diminishing returns before difficulty puts on the brakes.