Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

I am a newbie.  I installed Ubuntu and ran bitcoind from my user account.  After a little while, I got the following message:

2022-04-23T03:48:14Z *** Disk space is too low!
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z Error: Disk space is too low!
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z FlushStateToDisk: write coins cache to disk (4827382 coins, 685726kB) completed (0.00s)
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z ForceFlushStateToDisk: failed to flush state (Disk space is too low!)
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z FlushStateToDisk: write coins cache to disk (4827382 coins, 685726kB) started
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z *** Disk space is too low!
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z Error: Disk space is too low!
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z FlushStateToDisk: write coins cache to disk (4827382 coins, 685726kB) completed (0.00s)
2022-04-23T03:48:14Z ForceFlushStateToDisk: failed to flush state (Disk space is too low!)
2022-04-23T03:48:15Z Shutdown: done

I allocated 500GB to / during installation.  When I checked the disk space usage, I got the following:

root@simba:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs           1.6G  2.0M  1.6G   1% /run
/dev/sda4       492G  467G   90M 100% /
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0      249M  249M     0 100% /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/99
/dev/loop1       62M   62M     0 100% /snap/core20/1328
/dev/loop2      128K  128K     0 100% /snap/bare/5
/dev/loop3       66M   66M     0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1519
/dev/loop4       55M   55M     0 100% /snap/snap-store/558
/dev/sda1       256M   90M  167M  36% /boot/efi
tmpfs           1.6G  136K  1.6G   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/loop6      111M  111M     0 100% /snap/core/12834
/dev/loop7      9.0M  9.0M     0 100% /snap/canonical-livepatch/132
/dev/loop8       62M   62M     0 100% /snap/core20/1405
/dev/loop9       44M   44M     0 100% /snap/snapd/15177
/dev/loop10      45M   45M     0 100% /snap/snapd/15534
/dev/loop5      9.0M  9.0M     0 100% /snap/canonical-livepatch/138
root@simba:~#

I am lost as to why so much space is being used by bitcoind.  I would appreciate if someone can shed light on this.

It downloads and stores the entire blockchain, and it also has its own databases. All of that is 430+ GB now. With an OS also on that disk, 500 GB is not enough.

You could enable pruning and that would delete the vast majority of the blockchain. It reduces the stored data to around 5 GB (with the default setting) but at the cost of being unable to serve old block or to lookup historical transactions. However your node will still download and verify all blocks and transactions so it is still a full node. It will just delete them when they get old enough.

Pruning can be enabled by adding prune=550 to your bitcoin.conf file.

If you want to store the entire blockchain, you will need to get a bigger hard drive.

Your drive is completely full according to both bitcoind and your filesystem.

I'd recommend trying to move off something before the next shutdown and restart so it doesn't start up and run extremely slowly - depending on the os - (normally about 1GB is enough).

The current blockchain size is 402.55 GB for Apr 25 2022
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_blockchain_size

Op should have some extra files than the bitcoin node on that disk, move them to a USB or external drive and it should work fine.

And I would recommend a bigger disk, at least 1TB to avoid this kind of problems. The blockchain is growing up fast.

That data is either not accurate or obtained from different full node implementation. Blockchain size on my device (using Bitcoin Core) is almost 430GB. You also need to include chainstate which has size about 4.7GB and index (txindex and blockfilter) which has size 43GB.


I agree.

Bitcoin Blockchain is roughly 389 gigabytes, you also have additional directories using 8GB, 2GB, and the files you may have installed, and package upgrades will eventually start to take up more and more.

You can find information about the Blockchain Size here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/647523/worldwide-bitcoin-blockchain-size/

Both are inaccurate. Achow101 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5395925.msg59958138#msg59958138) was correct. Mine is 428 GB (459 billion bytes).

You can reduce the reserved blocks space as a temporary solution. The default is 5%, if you make it 2%, you gain 15 GB. See for instance this site (https://ma.ttias.be/change-reserved-blocks-ext3-ext4-filesystem-linux/).

Thank you for tips.  I checked the tunefs and got following:

root@simba:~# tune2fs -l /dev/sda4 | grep 'Reserved'
Reserved block count:     6553600
Reserved GDT blocks:      1024
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)

This doesn't seem like 15GB.  Am I correct?

Never mind.  I just realized this is the number of blocks.  Thank you for this tip.  It gave me back 15GB! :)

Note the word "temporary" for the solution: having a disk this full will make it slower. I set it to 2% too on my own disks, but it's better not to fill it all the time.

Thank you very much for the help.  After I got back the 15GB, I went to my Windows 11 installation and shrunk that volume to get additional space of 300GB (using Disk Management in W11).  Then after a lot of head scratching on how to append this to root partition, someone on AskUbuntu had suggested using Gparted from a bootable USB.  This helped tremendously.  It allowed me to add the 300GB to the root partition and now I have 800GB of space.

I ran Bicoincore last night and voila, I have all the blocks downloaded and syncd.

Thank you everyone for your valuable assistance  :)