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Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: jantaro on March 10, 2016, 05:05:59 PM



Title: CPU Overloads when running bitcoind -daemon
Post by: jantaro on March 10, 2016, 05:05:59 PM
 Hi, I m having a little issue when running bitcoind. I downloaded sourcecode and both bitcoind and bitcoin-qt were compiled by myself.

i just run bitcoind -daemon to download blocks

The thing is that after the first hour of block downloading, my 4 CPU begin to work at rates over 95 % and RAM reaches 44% ( I got 8GB ). I m working with GNU/Linux Trisquel Belenos, which is essentially Ubuntu from FSF, then when I try to check out with bitcoin-cli getinfo, it does not answers back the query as usual, and the command line just blinks. So, I Kill bitcoind, and the bitcoin-cli comes back, of course saying thereīs no response from server. If I restart the process ( without restarting computer ). well the overload happens again after few minutes. I donīt feel like safe leaving blockchain downloading if this strange overloads are happening to me.

Is there something I should configure?.

Is there any way of setting a limit of CPU usage for this process?.

what could be wrong or what should I check, it is just that I donīt know what to do.

I m under risk of machine physical damage, leaving the computer working at these rates?.


I would appreciate a lot any kind of help, so thanks in advance to those who could say something back. Kind regards.


Title: Re: CPU Overloads when running bitcoind -daemon
Post by: shorena on March 10, 2016, 06:05:29 PM
Hi, I m having a little issue when running bitcoind. I downloaded sourcecode and both bitcoind and bitcoin-qt were compiled by myself.

i just run bitcoind -daemon to download blocks

The thing is that after the first hour of block downloading, my 4 CPU begin to work at rates over 95 % and RAM reaches 44% ( I got 8GB ). I m working with GNU/Linux Trisquel Belenos, which is essentially Ubuntu from FSF, then when I try to check out with bitcoin-cli getinfo, it does not answers back the query as usual, and the command line just blinks. So, I Kill bitcoind, and the bitcoin-cli comes back, of course saying thereīs no response from server. If I restart the process ( without restarting computer ). well the overload happens again after few minutes. I donīt feel like safe leaving blockchain downloading if this strange overloads are happening to me.

Is there something I should configure?.

Can you post your debug.log? Its in ~/.bitcoin same as the other files.

Is there any way of setting a limit of CPU usage for this process?.

You can limit the cores used, yes. Im not entirely sure core is not just verifying blocks though.

what could be wrong or what should I check, it is just that I donīt know what to do.

I m under risk of machine physical damage, leaving the computer working at these rates?.


I would appreciate a lot any kind of help, so thanks in advance to those who could say something back. Kind regards.

You only risk physical damage if your machine is insufficiently cooled. The initial download and verification puts a lot of strain on your CPU, disk and bandwith. The 4 GB memory usage might just be cached data or did you increase your database cache (with e.g. dbcache=2048 in the bitcoin.conf file)?


Title: Re: CPU Overloads when running bitcoind -daemon
Post by: Moloch on March 10, 2016, 08:20:17 PM
Bitcoin uses a lot of CPU to verify blocks, and verifying 400,000 blocks does put a strain on the CPU

The only option I'm aware of is:
Settings -> Options -> Number of script verification threads

This will let you set the number of CPU threads to utilize (assuming you have more than 1 core in your CPU)


You can find a list of command-line/conf options here, but I don't think any of those will help you:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin)