My C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin directory has ballooned up to approx. 17 GB and I feel like this is larger than it needs to be...

This is an old install that has been running since basically v0.3 and has never been modified or cleaned out.

Is there a way I can reduce this file size? and which files would be safe to delete to attempt this? I am ok having to redownload portions of the block chain but I don't want to lose my addresses...obviously (I assume wallet.dat is the only "really important" file I need to keep?)



EDIT: Sorry I realized this may actually be in the wrong forum section...please move this topic if it would be better suited somewhere else

I just wrote this guide up on how to use m0mchil's miner with slush's pool (a bit of blog promotion....  ). Please leave any feedback or questions/problems in this thread.

http://www.newslobster.com/bitcoin/how-to-set-up-pooled-bitcoin-mining-in-windows

Sort of by accident I located 2 columns in the windows UI which are not re-sizable and are essentially invisible by default. They can be shown by pressing ctrl-"+" which is the auto-fit keyboard shortcut in windows to re-size all the columns on screen to make their contents as fully visible as the window size allows. They appear to the left of the "Status" column in all of the tabs.

The first one is a 21 or 22 character string of numbers of the format 0000012345-1-9087654321 (and may contain a final trailing "-0" if it is a transaction where you sent coins).

The second is a very long hex string of about 64 characters or so (I am too lazy to try to count them all)

I would provide a screenshot...but I do not know if there are any privacy implications in disclosing what my transaction log displays (and specifically the contents of these columns).



I am just wondering what these columns are for, and why they are hidden and locked by default?

A bit of shameless blog promotion....but I felt like writing up a proper guide to use bitcoin on windows since I couldn't really find anything like this

http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows

Please feel free to critique and point out any errors or other problems, also please comment if you like it 

(crosspost from m0m's miner thread...but some of the replies there lead me to believe that this may be something that happens on the real network too...)

I made a bit of a discovery when testing m0m's latest binaries in -testnet, look at the times when blocks are generated in the miners, and note that they don't all show up in bitcoin's UI:



There seems to sometimes be a delay of 1 or more minutes between when they show up in the miner and when bitcoin picks up the transaction, if it picks it up at all.
Is this something to worry about, or just a peculiarity of testnet?

Other people have said that they "lose" about 10% of the blocks that they generate, which to me seems unacceptable if it takes possibly multiple days to generate a block....is there any merit to these claims?

I've been running bitcoin for a few weeks on my windows 7 machine now. With my i7 processor I was getting around 6000 khash/s pretty consistently (using only CPU generation). Then I started messing around with trying to compile the source in both Visual Studio and MinGW. I was only successful in building openssl and wxwidgets with mingw, my attempts with the berkeley db library failed, and I didn't really try with boost; I was also largely unsuccessful thus far with visual studio. I did briefly try running puddinpop's cuda client, first the cracked one and then to compare performance, his last "official" release with auto-donation feature. It was sometime after this that I noticed my cpu-only hash rate had now fallen to only around 4000 khash/sec.

I've tried rebooting my machine several times, I've even deleted the precompiled binary and removed the files from my %APPDATA% folder and started over again with a fresh install (redownloaded all the blocks) without any success. I have tried changing the throttling settings with respect to limiting the number of cores without being able to reach my previous calculation rate. I have even tried stopping all non-system-critical services to see if that was having any impact, but previously with my higher hashrate, I was not operating with a minimal set of processes.

I'm pretty stumped as to what would cause this fairly dramatic decrease in performance. Someone in IRC was thinking that if the win32 stock binary doesn't have statically linked libraries I may have broken something while messing around with compilation, is this possible?

I suppose it's also possible that one of the other clients I tried have somehow affected performance, or left something undesirable behind which are stealthily eating up some of my cpu cycles...

At this point I'm kind of at a loss and I'm hoping someone can offer some insight or advice as to what may have caused this?

I've been playing around with visual studio (2010) trying to build bitcoin from the source that is included in the win32 zip archive. I created a new makefile project and imported the makefile, acquired the boost, wxwidgets, and the openssl sources, and a few other files which were reported missing when I would try to build. I got as far as the build log reporting that it needed iostream.h, so I went and found a copy of that from libstdc++. Now, after trying to build with iostream.h located in my includes directory, I am getting loads of errors that look like this:

Code:

1>------ Build started: Project: bitcoin_test, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------
1>Build started 9/14/2010 08:07:14.
1>InitializeBuildStatus:
1>  Touching "Debug\bitcoin_test.unsuccessfulbuild".
1>ClCompile:
1>  util.cpp
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(15): error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '<'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(15): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(16): error C2146: syntax error : missing ';' before identifier 'cs_mapAddressBook'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(16): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(16): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(17): error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '<'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(17): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(23): error C2146: syntax error : missing ';' before identifier 'dbenv'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(23): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(23): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(34): error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '*'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(34): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(34): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(35): error C2146: syntax error : missing ';' before identifier 'strFile'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(35): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(35): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(36): error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '<'
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(36): error C4430: missing type specifier - int assumed. Note: C++ does not support default-int
1>c:\users\[myusername]\desktop\bitcoin-0.3.12\src\db.h(36): error C2238: unexpected token(s) preceding ';'

This has happened with 2 different versions of iostream.h (tried changing <iostream.h> to <iostream> in db.h also), and if I remove iostream.h from my includes directory it simply reports that file is missing and doesn't give hundreds of lines of errors like the above. I haven't modified any files at all, I am just trying to get the project to build in a windows environment right now...

I am sort of stuck here and haven't been able to figure out what the problem is. Admittedly I don't entirely know what I'm doing (I don't have a whole lot of experience with C++ in windows), but I was wondering if anyone has any ideas what my problem might be.

I just setup bitcoin on my windows box, and I noticed that there is no way to prevent bitcoin.exe from sucking up all of my CPU cycles. Setting bitcoin.exe to low priority in the taskmanager is kind of a crappy workaround, but it still uses up all of my CPU time (and I fear what it may do to my power bill).

Is there any way to restrict the amount of CPU time or resource percentage that I devote to bitcoin generation? I'm running an old single-core athlon64 on my server, so restricting the number of cores doesn't really do me much good either.

EDIT: Just realized this may be in the wrong forum....sorry if it is.....