Bitcoin Forum

For running the bitcoin daemon on a server what would the overhead be for running it? Then what would the computational cost be for making transactions?

Surprisingly I could not find very much information about this so if anyone can give an answer I will much appreciate it.

you'd want at least 512mb ram... can be done on 256mb but you're really on the edge.

i don't think 'making a transaction' takes much cpu at all... like sending an email.

I can confirm that. For the bitcoind 256MB is just enough better go with 512MB. CPU doesn't matter.

Thanks. And I checked here for the data transfer requirements: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=58854.0

Apparently 0.041GB out and 0.03GB in. That's nothing. Transactions are very small, I read about 300 bytes? So I guess unless you were doing a hundred a minute or something crazy like that, it really doesn't matter.

Be aware requirements will scale with transaction volume.

Currently transaction volume is very low <0.2 tps.

on my vps, bitcoind uses  less than 30% of 256MB, that's less than 80M

I would try https://hostigation.com/ if your looking for a cheap VPS. I had bitcoind and p2pool running on a 256/512 and was using approx. ~65% of the ram (A little into the burst, but burst is always available so don't worry about it)

A 256/512MB OpenVZ goes for 4$ a month with them. I suggest LA as I heard the SC bandwidth rates are terribad. Bandwidth of LA: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1627046490.png

Oh yeah, and if you really wanna push it with only 256MB WITH burst, you might be able to do that even. That's 20$ a year (1.66$/month)

These cloud servers (I'll bunch VPS under cloud servers even while people say they are different they are essentially the same) are interesting since they are very flexible and it seems for most cases can be used as a dedicated server could be used. The cloud servers also are available at lower starting costs. I've read some scare stories about how cloud servers can be unreliable with a lot of downtime though it seems that's not the case with good companies. I assume the cloud servers are just as secure as dedicated servers are.

All you really need is the right provider. Anyone have comments about these different server solutions?

I am running a bitcoind node on AWS.  I cannot give accurate estimates, but bitcoind generally does cause more disk I/O than is provided by the free tier. 

PS.  I was curious where my "internal AWS transfers" were coming from.  This thread reminded me that I am probably talking to other AWS bitcoin nodes.  I believe AWS publishes the IP ranges used in each region.  It would be interested to see how many other AWS nodes there are. 

Actually the greatest cost of running bitcoind is security :P

bitcoind uses almost 512MB, so for a server a bare minimum would be 1 GB plus another 1GB for swap, it will run will lest memory but you will get reduced performance.

is there a way to reduce the IO by increasing the DB buffer?

Good point, lets discuss a bit in that direction?

Disk IO requirements should be much reduced by bitcoin 0.8 when it comes out, due to the move to leveldb and ultraprune.

Since this thread has already been revived, I'd like to state that I'm running bitcoind on 256 MB RAM with no problems. System reports bitcoind is using 112 MB. FWIW.