The network seems stressed (and behind) right now

[Rothgar]

It's been a while since a block hasn't come out below the 731kB softcap.    

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[Rothgar]

The next block came out at 976kB

[shorena]

Yes, loads of TX waiting for a confirmation lately. Even those with a fee

[Bit_Happy]

Yes, loads of TX waiting for a confirmation lately. Even those with a fee

This is a serious issue needing a solution.

[dothebeats]

Hmm. Seems like the network is really stressed. Too much transactions "clogged"?

[kendog77]

There don't even seem to be an excessive amount of transactions in these blocks that are approaching 1 meg.

Perhaps someone found out how to create really large transactions and clog up the network?

[najzenmajsen]

There don't even seem to be an excessive amount of transactions in these blocks that are approaching 1 meg.

Perhaps someone found out how to create really large transactions and clog up the network?

if that's what is happening we're all doomed , we need to make the dev's aware of this someone should contact them :>

[Gleb Gamow]

There don't even seem to be an excessive amount of transactions in these blocks that are approaching 1 meg.

Perhaps someone found out how to create really large transactions and clog up the network?

if that's what is happening we're all doomed , we need to make the dev's aware of this someone should contact them :>

We tried, but the fees included with our requests weren't high enough to warrant their attention. 

[Rothgar]

There don't even seem to be an excessive amount of transactions in these blocks that are approaching 1 meg.

Perhaps someone found out how to create really large transactions and clog up the network?

I doubt that large (kB) transactions are that hard to figure out how to do.  I doubt it's malicious. 

[Meuh6879]

Well, daily transactions is over 100 000 now ... all days ! 

[PolarPoint]

We are not far off the 1M max block size now. The max block size solution Gavin proposed should gain more support.

[davejh]

From what I can see we've seen a lot of blocks today that have been mined by pools that are using the default 750,000 byte block soft limit (these show up as 731 kBytes), while a few have been mined by pools that support the 1M bytes block limit (these show up as 976 kBytes).

Now what's actually happened is that for quite a number of hours the network was having an "unlucky" day and didn't find many blocks. It wasn't hugely unlucky (there were no hour+ gaps between blocks as happened 3 times in 24 hours a few weeks ago), but it was moderately unlucky.

Starting at 11am GMT these were the numbers of blocks per hour: 3, 3, 2, 4, 4, 8, 5, 7, 8, 4, 9.  Over the 11 hour period we had 57 blocks whereas we might nominally expect 66. 57 out of 66 is actually surprisingly common. Much less common (but not totally unexpected) is that in the first 5 hours we only had 16 blocks instead of 30. Again it's not totally unexpected but it's less common. The next 6 hours saw 41 instead of 36 though.

Now total transaction volumes for the day aren't anything unusual (they're steadily climbing but Saturdays are always quieter than during the week), but it seems that there have been some reasonably large size transactions today as the mean block size is 0.424 Mbytes. What that means is that we had a period of time where for 5 hours the transactions could back up. I ran some estimates for the effective network block capacity a few weeks ago and it's around 770,000 bytes per block, but if we're only finding 16/30ths of the normal blocks in our 5 hours then that drops to an effective capacity of nearer 410,000 bytes.

What this means is that for 5 hours we were seeing more transactions than the block selectors were prepared to process (not the network, the miners, or more precisely the mining pools!).

What's interesting are the comments that larger fees didn't help. This suggests that some block makers may not be selecting transactions based on their associated fees. Of course no fee, no matter how large, can make blocks be found any quicker so if there's a 40 minute gap between blocks then you still have to wait 40 minutes.

If anyone's not already seen them, here are the more formal write-ups:

http://hashingit.com/analysis/33-7-transactions-per-second
http://hashingit.com/analysis/34-bitcoin-traffic-bulletin
http://hashingit.com/analysis/39-the-myth-of-the-megabyte-bitcoin-block
http://hashingit.com/analysis/41-waiting-for-blocks

[No_2]

Thanks dave. Very informative.

[Shogen]

By the way, the average block size is now around 400KB, slowly increased from 300KB 6 months ago.
http://btc.blockr.io/charts

[davejh]

So I checked blockchain.info's unconfirmed transaction page.

There are currently about 2k (increasing rapidly) unconfirmed transactions and a total of .05 in fees (not increasing rapidly at all) are offered with all of those transactions.

Thats about .000025 in fees per transaction.

Gee, I wonder why it takes a while for them to confirm?

Looking at the list there are huge numbers of transactions paying no fees at all, or paying dust-sized fees. That suggests a lot of people are quite happy to wait however long it takes to find a block maker who's feeling generous and mines them. I use the word "generous" advisedly as most fees don't pay enough to cover the incremental risk of having an orphan race lose the associated miners their block reward, but zero fees are a joke as far as economically sane miner is concerned.

[mprep]

So I checked blockchain.info's unconfirmed transaction page.

There are currently about 2k (increasing rapidly) unconfirmed transactions and a total of .05 in fees (not increasing rapidly at all) are offered with all of those transactions.

Thats about .000025 in fees per transaction.

Gee, I wonder why it takes a while for them to confirm?

That's the average that's lowered by transactions with no fees that wouldn't be confirmed for a long time or ever at all anyway. If many transactions included in that statistic has equal or above recommended fees, we could have a powerful "selfish" miner problem.

EDIT: Beat me by a few mins, davejh. 

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Dust bowl approaching

[jdbtracker]

I think it's time maybe we started looking into some solutions, to partition part of the network, just the transaction wait time thing, it definitely needs work.

The devs should think about adding lower hash rate confirms to make the program be aware of priority transactions. I was thinking of setting up queue areas for transactions that would confirm them as accepted by the network and flag that it is in the process of  verifying it. Think of it as a pre-double spend clearance, weeding out unwanted transactions for the main network to confirm.

I was thinking of holding these incoming transaction in hash-trees: Transaction comes in gets added to the initial queue, Miner individually checks the transaction, tells the network it has it in it's personal Hash-tree, if other miners have the transaction they will add it to their own queues, eliminating the double spend at a lower hash rate. We could get a whole lot more transactions waiting in memory and then just confirm the Hash-tree transactions... effectively we have to find a way to compress the transactions further and compressing whole sets of 1mb blocks worth of transactions into hashes... could let us do that.

A lot of the work for figuring out parameters is left for miners to figure out, there has to be a way for the program to become self-aware enough to adjust them itself depending on fees, time, or position in the queue.

http://keccak.noekeon.org/Sakura.pdf

[LiteCoinGuy]

[cyberpinoy]

Hmm. Seems like the network is really stressed. Too much transactions "clogged"?

Its because you are loosing miners left and right. No miners means no transactions processed, at a difficulty of over 46 billion, and a value of only 200 to 230 bucks, its just not profitable to mine bitcoin. All your small miners you guys think are worthless are now mining other coins and flipping them for bigger profits, all the big mining compuonds are bogged down with huge difficulties. This is because the big compounds have no idea what they are doing as far as securing the network, all they care about is making X amount of dollars for solving X amount of blocks so they can pay the electric and have enough left over to fuel their yacht.

The small miners are needed a lot more than this community would liek to give them credit for actually, at this point with sometimes 2 hour confirms on bitcoin transaction the bottom line is, you need more computing power, and its just not worth it to mine Bitcoins right now.