Bitcoin Forum

Are there known cases of people having problems just because of the sheer number of addresses they've generated in their bitcoind wallets?
Any info on actual limits?

I don't think there are any limits, and I don't think it would crash it, if you're afraid it will however, just avoid it.
It's not worth trying it to find out, and maybe causing trouble with your wallet.

That's good to know.
Should we expect performance issues though? For example the wallet grows to 90mb in just few months, and it's being encrypted and decrypted all the time.

It may take a bit longer to Decrypt and encrypt.

If you have 1 address and do a rescan it will take X time...

if you hve 50X addresses and do a rescsan it can take 50X time, kinda.
Well I don't think its exactly like that, but along those lines...

I don't have the best laptop... no SSD etc... and a rescan for 1 addy tpok 20 mins recently for me.
then another wallet with 7 addresses took 55 minutes... so ts like not it took X * 20 = total time... X being addresses, 20 minutes being the average scam time... but for me it did make a large difference... but not cant 7x longer.

Why not sending all your coins into a single fresh new wallet if you are concerned?

Awhile back I imported the private key for "correct horse battery staple" and it had so many transactions it kept crashing Armory when I tried to scan the blockchain.  Armory has since updated their wallet but I had already removed the address due to the time it took to open the wallet.  That is number of transactions rather than addresses but I expect the same thing would happen.

Well rescan is not really a concern here, since we are talking about bitcoind node that's up 24/7 on a dedicated server.
I'm more concerned if it would make using the wallet slower for the front end app or cause other problems.

That doesn't matter because Armory takes the blockchain data and reprocesses it into the Armory database and that is what takes long.  Rescan means Armory is scanning that data for transactions associated with the addresses in the wallet. 

Either way, "dude," scanning and keeping the node updated are 2 different things.

Generating and dealing with tens of thousands of addresses shouldn't cause a problem with bitcoind on a dedicated server, no. Once you hit "millions" and beyond, you might see some slowdown in performance -- this is why you'll see exchanges occasionally moving to new wallets because of bloat.

You may have unlimited of bitcoin address on your server

I think that's a woman you are talking to. No really.

Anyway, on topic, I did hear about btc-e facing problems because they had 100s of thousands of addresses to track. Most exchanges use custom software because of this sort of thing.

exchanges have 10ks of adresses and work fine

probably fine, it becomes an issue based on the number of transactions per address.  I have an old phone with bitcoinj on it (shildenbach's wallet)  It was getting ridiculous using the same address for mining payouts so I had to export it to another wallet to deal with it and changed addresses to deal with it (when selling coin in person).

wallet can have loads of adresses - just look at exchanges

transfering out btc become very very slow (5-20 seconds per tx) when you have >20k active addresses.

I dont think so.

Any decent proof for this ?

the question is, is it really necessary?

Some persons don't reuse addresses though they might not delete it from the wallet, so if they somehow get any BTC into the old address they can still get it. If the wallet is too old, then it may contain too much addresses. OR if you do something related to company and all, you may have these much addresses. Anyway, that's not the point here. ::)

I didn't hard any limits, yet. I think there is no limit. But if you generate too much addresses in your wallet, it may become slow unless your GHz increases.

  ~~MZ~~

active address i mean if the address is not empty.

bitcoind is pain in the ass in large scale

Althoug you can have unlimited address, in my opinion it's not a good idea.
I think it is useless have so many address.

My wallet.dat file is 2.7mb no clue how many new addresses i have in it but it takes a lota time to start
even when it says verifying blocks and loading wallet file takes like 2-3 minutes in it.
So i say probably not the best idea but if you are having no issues in loading and whatnot sure wth.

I find the wallet.dat grows very quickly when you have a website generating unique addresses for each order. Then basic functions, like -rescan, start to take a CRAZY HUGE amount of time. Bitcoin really isn't scalable at all :(