Why is the share difficulty on my server node set to 22,000,000 and how can i change that? I have been running for 15+ hours with Antminer s9 and no shares, every time i near the share level at 22million, it rises again, up to 24million. Is this a bug or a hack because 22,000,000 is insane?
P2pool's architecture has a multi-way tradeoff between node computational requirements, payout fairness, and share variance (share difficulty). The BTC p2pool is configured to adjust the minimum share difficulty in order to get one share from someone on average every 30 seconds. if you have 0.1% of the pool's hashrate, then you'll have to wait on average 30,000 seconds for each share.
If we reduce that 30 second target to 10 seconds, then p2pool will become less fair. Many shares will end up getting orphaned and work will go unrewarded, and those orphan shares will disproportionately affect small miners. 30 seconds is actually probably too short; I think increasing that number to 60 seconds is a good idea.
Keep in mind, if you are mining on a large public p2pool node with a lot of other users, the actual share difficulty used by your miner will be *higher* than 22,000,000, even if 22,000,000 is shown on the front page as the "Difficulty" -- that number is actually the protocol-specified minimum share difficulty, not the actual share difficulty. You can force your node to give you work with the protocol-minimum share difficulty by specifying <address>/1024 as your username. However, you should only do this if you are a small-scale miner. If you are a large miner, using the minimum share difficulty will increase the minimum share difficulty for everybody.
every time i near the share level at 22million, it rises again, up to 24million
This is a misunderstanding of how mining works. There is no progress. You can't "get near" to finding a share. It is possible (but improbable) to find a 22 million diff share after only one second of mining on an S9, and it's also possible (but improbable) to not find any shares after a month. The amount of time it is expected to take to find a share is independent of how long you've been looking for a share.