Bandwidth usage as of late

[GigaWave]

Anyone else notice a increase of upload usage?  Example, on April first, my node uploaded about 10GB. I also keep getting little system hangs, maybe a few time a hour.

[Stephen Gornick]

Anyone else notice a increase of upload usage?  Example, on April first, my node uploaded about 10GB. I also keep getting little system hangs, maybe a few time a hour.

There are a lot of new users arriving, downloading the blockchain.  That puts additional traffic on each peer, especially if [edit: and only if] it is configured to accept incoming connections.

[lucb1e]

Yes, it's entirely flooding my 1mbps upload since a few months now. Even without portforwarding, I have to shut it down as soon as my own blockchain is complete, internet is entirely unusable for everyone in the house while Bitcoin is running. I try to download the blockchain at night as much as I can (portforwarding and uploading the chain is out of the question without ratelimiting), but of course I also need something called sleep...

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Anyone else notice a increase of upload usage?  Example, on April first, my node uploaded about 10GB. I also keep getting little system hangs, maybe a few time a hour.

Weird.

You know, i have only 512K upload and none of the problems you described. Bitcoin uses little upstream bandwidth, however it is behind a firewall.

I can even play Team Fortress 2 having 50ms ping to the closest server with Bitcoin-Qt & 20 other programs running in background.

[Mike Hearn]

If it's not accepting inbound connections through the firewall then you won't serve the chain to new users. Any time a new user runs Bitcoin-Qt and starts syncing the chain, they pick a single peer and then download several gigabytes of data from you.

If you're struggling to handle this, due to insufficient upload bandwidth at home, you could try throttling the app using a throttler tool or alternatively, just stop running Bitcoin-Qt and switch to a lighter weight client.

[Saturn7]

I have a couple of dedicated full nodes in a datacentre,

upload for March was 480GB vs 40GB to 60GB in December!

now both servers are uploading at an average of 8 to 10 mbps 24 hours a day!

[GigaWave]

I was thinking that a influx of new users was the cause. Good thing though as more users will likely help stabilize and raise BTC value.

Here it is the 4th and I've nearly uploaded as much as all of January. I think the system hangs are some type of priority issue, possible even windows. More likely though BticoinQT sucking up some resource in a none discriminant way. I'm going to move the data files to a Ramdisk here soon and see if that helps. I'm not going to try to restrict it if that fixes it. Even when the upstream peaks, it hardly uses my available bandwidth(on fiber optic). Although maybe my ISP may complain about the tally a the end of the month.

I see the block chain size having the possibility to be a major issue in the future. Anyone have some links discussing this?

[Mike Hearn]

You don't need to move the chain onto RAM disk. All operating systems use spare RAM as a disk cache, so as long as you aren't using all RAM for applications as much of the chain as possible will be served off RAM already.

The reason there are so many new users sucking down the chain is we're still pointing people towards Bitcoin-Qt. Probably a lot of the people who are downloading the chain won't be serving it to new users themselves as they'll be behind firewalls, and many will likely give up at some point and just shut down the app without letting it fully sync. We tried to advertise MultiBit a while ago but the current release was too buggy. The best way to address huge bandwidth usage is to work on MultiBit (it's java so many programmers can take part), that way you'll be only transmitting Bloom filtered blocks which are much lighter.