Bitcoin Forum

As many of you know, I maintain a full node over public WiFi. This means that I have several restrictions imposed on me. I can only allow outbound connections, and there is a maximum of eight permitted. However, very frequently I see that  I have only been able to make 2 or 3 connections, or none at all for some periods, and traffic is sporadic. Often there are quiet spots of many minutes between communication bursts. This is common to a variety of locations, so I suspect it is not due to limitations imposed by the service provider. Speed varies between 50Kb/s and 2,000Kb/s, and node ping rimes are usually lower than 100ms, although at the moment they seem to be in the range 100ms-500ms. I'm using Core version 0.18.0 under Windows 10.

I had to switch back to Windows for a couple of reasons, but I will probably return to Linux ( Ubuntu or Mint ) next month. I feel that the fact that I only run my node a couple of times a day, and that I am on a limited connection, may mean that some peers are blocking me, and that is limiting my ability to find eight good nodes for synchronisation. Is there anything I can do to improve my support for the Bitcoin system, and thus find some more peers who are prepared to  be my "friends".

Do you have a discussion as to the other info on the public Wi-Fi?
I have some thoughts but they might be a re-hash of another discussion.
But:
1) Are you always in the same location? Or are you getting different IPs?

2) Are you sure it's the sporadic traffic is the fault of the connection and not your PC? When you get in a block it thinks about the block and if you don't have enough CPU you wait.

3) If you have a node that lets you connect make a note of it and then use addnode in your conf file to make sure you try to connect to it next time.

-Dave

I think the main issue here is that your ip keeps changing. It probably causes more of a problem to connect to it than it does not doing... You might be better off just using it for yourself unless you can get a static IP. Often, public places have multiple IP addresses so thst might be an issue too if you get switched between routers (as most use systems to switch from one router to another when one is busy).

I've been running the node for about 4 years, and it is a Core i5 notebook with a 2Tb hard drive, and rhat has about 1Tb of unused space. Location vary, but are usually either McDonalds or KFC. I'm at KFC now, and I started core to check. It's managed to find 2 peers, and it is estimating 8 minutes for 5 hours of synchronisation. Connection is about 200Kb/s. It is varying between 2 and 4 peers, with some of them dropping out, and this is what is leading me to believe that I have made myself undesirable in some way.

I'm up to 300 Kb/s now. McDonalds can predict a sync time of 8 hours for a 30 hour catch up at times.

It used to be fairly stable and consistent, but since segwit, the connection can be sporadic. I've taken a couple of screen caps of the traffic, and I'll post those a bit later.

I think nodes might be picked based on ping speeds. That might be where you're less competitive as my computer seems to stick with less than 1 second ping speeds (the fastest is normally about 88ms).

Send me your ip and I can test it on my phone?

Man, I love your free spirit, Jet Cash.

I also "borrow" public wi-fi from home using a couple of adapters, and usually I have a decent connection.  I don't run a bitcoin node, but I do run full PIVX and NAV nodes and haven't encountered much trouble, though internet can be spotty at times.  I'm also using a desktop PC, not a laptop--not sure if that matters much.

JC, if you're ever in the states, let's hook up and get coffee or something.  My treat.

If you didn't face the same problem when you were using Linux, then the problem is with Windows and most likely because of the firewall as I don't think it has any thing to do with low bandwith or other nodes blocking yours (only unresponsive or malicious nodes get blacklisted)

I found this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2880760), OP had the same problem. It turned out that the firewall was considering the outbound connections as intrusion and was dropping them.

I hope it will solve the problem.

I hate Windows. I switched back because I've got some passwords stored, and I've forgotten them. I'm gradually changing them, and I hope I can run everything on Linux machines soon. I put Mint on a 2Tb SSD, and I just swopped it for the HDD in the notebook. It's a massive improvement. I keep meaning to see if I can put the drives in USB cases, and boot from them, that would let me switch without picking the machine to pieces.

I've got a few difficulties to resolve at the moment, but once I'm through those, I'll copy my wallet and the blockchain onro a USB drive, and try sync'ing it with the Netbook. That is running Ubuntu. All these experiments seem to have to go on the backburner far too often.  Once of my emerging problems is the change to the cPanel licensing fees, and I may have to switch my bulk domain hosting to Direct Admin.

I'm in a larger McDonalds atm, and it is pretty quiet - 10am on Monday here. I've fired up my node, and it's picked up a couple of peers almost instantly - one is using /Satoshi:0.18.0/ as a user agent, and the other uses /btcwire:0.5.0/btcd:0.12.0/, another has just dropped out and been replaced with an agent /Satoshi:0.16.0/. The ones that are dropping out have unspecified user agents. Will these user agents make any difference to connectivity maintenance?

Pings are between 61ms and 587ms - the second node at 215ms seems to be doing most of the work, that is the btcwire one.

Yeah the ping/bandwidth might not be too much of a problem then...

Im running bitcoin core on Ubuntu. I'm hoping to switch it out for a light version of debian as I don't like Ubuntu (I wanted to use alpine but it requires a docker)...

I don't think the USB enclosure thing will work (I have an adapter I don't mind shipping though somewhere for 2.5" drives). External drives don't work as well as internal ones unless you can use something fast. Maybe getting a nas drive and plugging it into your computers Internet (if that's possible) or running core off the drive... Motherboard computers might also be helpful if you think you're unlikely to snap the many capacitors and spikes off accidentally.

I think the answer is ro switch to the Mint SSD, and keep it internal. That is if I decide to stay with Mint. I'm in B&Q ( DIY superstore) at the moment, and it picked up 3 peers instantly, and the b/w is reported as over 2Kb/s. The coffee is quite good, but they serve it in soup bowls, and it goes cold so quickly as a result.

I must move my a**e and create my WiFi review site obviously. However, Hayling Island beach has a bit more appeal today.

I'm up to 8 low ping rate peers at the moment, and still over 2Kb.

This will not have an impact on what the user is trying to accomplish. This only is helpful if you can't get any connections to somebody. The rest of the answers are all +- missing the root cause of the issue.

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Here's your list:
Static IP,
Decent hardware, especially high I/O (SSD),
(opt) high dbcache,
Decent network speed,
Reliability (not a on-and-off node),
Static IP.

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Every time your IP changes, your "appeal" resets to 0. If your IP changes frequently, then you will never reach connections in the > 100 range.

Those are probably the only things over which I have control. I want to switch to the SSD with Linux anyway. I've got a spare RAM slot in the notebook. It's probably worth doubling the RAM in the machine, and I'll look into the dbcache setting.

Thanks for the post.

How fast can ssds go? My hard drive (from a decade ago) has a speed of 6gbs and they're much better at storing data than ssds as they don't have the 10000 write limit...

Speaking of ram, it's actually possible to store the blockchain on ram if you get enough of it. A terabyte ssd is probably about the same price I can get a high speed terabyte of ram for (from what I can remember, 4x1024gb ram sticks cost about £1100).

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You could look into doing raids with the drives also, but you'd need a few free sata/pci/pci-e spaces free...

6Gb/s on a HDD? That's not possible. 6Gb/s is the maximum speed that SATA III connector can handle. HDDs usually have sequential reads and writes speeds at 160-180 MB/s while SATA III SSDs can go up to 550-600 MB/s. I personally use a NVMe SSD which takes advanatge of PCIe. Such drives can (sequentially) read data at the maximum of 3500 MB/s and write at 2500 MB/s (PCI 3.0 limitation; AMD now supports PCI 4.0).

Note: 6Gb/s is not the same as 6GB/s

You're welcome. Yes, you can improve those two the easiest but they have relatively little impact in comparison to a static IP. You could ask your ISP for one.

Any limitations that SSDs have are negligible for these use-cases, especially NVME. You're still living in the age of SSDs that was 10-15 years ago.

Basically (my experience, not advertised speeds):
HDDs: 50-100 MB/s
SSDs: 500-550 MB/s
NVME SSD (PCI-e 3.0): 3000-3500
NVME SSD (PCI-e 4.0, not tested but almost available): ~5000 MB/s.

With Bitcoin Core having a very high impact on I/O, even a step up from a HDD to a SATA one makes a crazy difference.

It says data 3.0Gb/s on the drive... Maybe they screwed up the lettering or something?

https://i.imgur.com/qsNyVBb.jpg

I need access to jets image sharing site ;D.

This is correct, yes. It indicates the connector support and its theoretical maximum speed. Gb/s is more often abbreviated as Gbps which stands for GigaBit (not GigaByte!) per second. This tool will help you understand/convert:
https://www.gbmb.org/gbps-to-mbs

Conversions are always confusing. It's rare you can say a small b is something and a big B is something else.

I normally end up just writing works as there's: gigabytes, gibibytes, gigabits and gibibits and there's enough confusion between everyone as to what each of them is.

1Gigabyte is normally 1024 mb
1gibibyte is 10^9

And youve said what the bit ones are...

apologies for still being Baronets. I'm in the Ram's Walk car park using the Waitrose WiFi on the netbook.

I'll set you up with a private gallery tomorrow on mobile img ( unless you want to be on Goofy Cat :) ).

Megabits/Gigabits are very often (if not always) used as advertised speeds by ISPs. So when you see 80 Mbps it's actually up to 10 MB/s. I've given you a link for the sake of converting.

A bit of an update on this. I seem to get more nodes connecting to me when I am in Kentucky Fried Chicken, than when I am in McDonalds
I suspect there is a joke in there somewhere. :) I don't think it is the ISP, so it must be something that McDonalds are doing to their customers' traffic.

Could be any number of reasons for that, impossible to tell with no information.

I think it is something that we digital nomads may need to consider. Bitcoin is a brilliant currency for us, and running a node isn't really too much of a problem. Having to drink too many cups of coffee whilst waiting for a synchronisation may be. I haven't had a chance to install Wireshark, and produce some stats.