Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: Wole on February 23, 2014, 08:16:20 PM



Title: Bitcoinqt full node - Moar bandwidth
Post by: Wole on February 23, 2014, 08:16:20 PM
Hello, I am running a full bitcoin node. Ports are open etc. Currently got 81 active connections to the bitcoin network.
However! - It is (at the moment) only using 87 KB/s. It seems to vary between 50-150 KB/s.
So heres the thing. I WANT it to use more bandwidth, I want to help the bitcoin network and use up more bandwidth. Unused bandwidth is wasted.

How do I go about doing this? Or does the network simply not need more bandwidth? Synching the wallet from scratch has always been painfully slow, so I would assume it could use some more.

Thanks in advance!


Title: Re: Bitcoinqt full node - Moar bandwidth
Post by: deepceleron on February 25, 2014, 09:11:54 AM
Deepceleron's Razor #8: If everybody brings more to a pot luck dinner than they can eat themselves, there will be leftovers.

The largest bandwidth one is likely to see besides a DDOS attempt is if a new user needs to download the whole blockchain, and randomly has picked you as the source of the blocks. Bitcoin doesn't "torrent". You are only an awesome node if you can provide these new blocks to a client at an upload rate of over 30-50MBit/s, correspondent to other's broadband download abilities.

Bitcoin isn't really that bandwidth-hungry once there is a full mesh of well-connected clients. Consider the ~7 blocks per hour - a node only has to get a new block from another upon receiving the announce. If you have 1000 nodes, with 999 connections each showing in the client, each node still only has to provide one copy of a block to the network on average, because there are only 999 "give me the block" requests from clients in total. A default block is less than 350kB.


Title: Re: Bitcoinqt full node - Moar bandwidth
Post by: Sukrim on February 25, 2014, 11:32:35 AM
Header-first syncing might help in the future, as data would likely be requested from more peers...
I for example seed the blockchain torrent and there is also sometimes little, sometimes a lot to upload, it depends on user's ability to find you, not just on their ability to connect to you.


Title: Re: Bitcoinqt full node - Moar bandwidth
Post by: thenoblebot on February 25, 2014, 01:33:52 PM
If you really WANT to then maybe you could try putting up another small server to act as full node .. or have a VM on your existing server for another full node or modify the source (but thats not up my alley).