Bitcoin Forum

I am working on a new project, which is actually a pivot of an old project and I am curious as to how many people are running clusters of bitcoinds to get scalability they need.

What would be the advantage of this?

You mean people running more than one instance of bitcoind?

Why should someone do this? What would be the gain?

Long time ago I used to run a bitcoind daemon on every mining machine I had. On top of that there were 2x bitcoind daemons in front and these ones had direct access to the internet. The miners each with their own with bitcoind daemon only had access to front end daemons. The front end bitcoind's also were rather well connected and won quite a few "block races".

This was way back when pool software was not easily available yet.

http://www.myfacewhen.net/uploads/2120-finn-wat.jpg
...I guess if I was running it on different IPs at different locations, it would help. But running a bunch from different computers at your house seems rather useless.

@mufa23: lol, just to put it into perspective for you, this setup was hashing 30%+ of the bitcoin network at the time.

Ok right now as it is scaling is horrible in the bitcoind one way to over come this is horizontal scaling. One advantage is one bitcoind would handle all your non-wallet commands and one would keep all your funds (2 bitcoinds). Another reason is to get rid of the pressure of one wallet having all your addresses (multiple bitcoinds). Another is to keep your funds spread out. And of course the user case Vladimir which is one I haven't even thought of. As growth is happening, this is just going to be more of a issue to show up in discussions.

Sorry, I still don't get it.
What do you mean with scaling issues? Is one bitcoind not connected enough, too ressource-hungry, too slow, too insecure?
Or is it more like a failover, or backuplink or similar?
Several wallets.. Why not having all addresses in one wallet.dat, and having "virtual wallets", like groups of addresses tagged in a database or the like, and catching newly-"created" change addresses and tagging accordingly.

Security? If you don't trust bitcoind enough, write/use a different one! ;-)
Spreading out between several (insecure/untrusted) instances lessens the value lost for each incident, and heightens the risk it actually happens.

How about, instead of a project with a bitcoind cluster, enhancing bitcoind directly to overcome the limitations you see?

Ente

Have you ever had over 100,000 address, it becomes slow, it becomes resource hungry, so I use two bitcoinds that complement each other and spilt up holding the addresses. Also it was never ment to be use in high traffic situations.


Cause the wallet.dat gets bloated and if i need to fix a stuck transaction which is basically do a -rescan on the transaction to free it on my personal computer, it takes so long upwards of hours. With smaller wallets it goes a little faster. Also different wallets for different sites.


This has nothing to do with security, while it does provide better security having your funds spread out, but not the main reason someone would do this setup.


You really can't enhancing the bitcoind for this with out a rewrite, and I am not doing a rewrite cause the software works good already and I don't have the time. My project would levage multiple bitcoinds, to solve this issue and make it more robust.

I have 13 miners, each has its own copy of bitcoin running.  I use these instances for solo mining.  My main work is sent to pools but the solo mining is my backup of last resort.  Only two of my wallets have any bitcoins in them.  One is my main stash.  The other was for when I was playing Satoshi dice.  That wallet has thousands of transactions on it.  Lots of transactions slows the wallet down.  I quit Satoshi dice months ago.  I grew weary of losing money.

Thank you for showing your situation and findings, gweedo.
Indeed you are talking a whole different level than I am.. :-)

Ente