node memory spec?

[hogwild]

I've been running 0.11.0 without any problems since August with 2.0 GB RAM.  Last week I did my regular Ubuntu updates, including the dist-upgrade.  I'm currently on:
$ uname -a
Linux xi-btc-01 3.16.0-50-generic #67~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 2 22:07:51 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Since then my bitcoind has crashed on a regular basis.  I upped the RAM to 3.0 GB and now it just crashes less frequently, but eventually does.  My top shows:

top - 14:18:36 up 1 day,  9:59,  1 user,  load average: 0.40, 0.28, 0.30
Tasks: 464 total,   1 running, 463 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.1 us,  0.6 sy,  1.2 ni, 97.6 id,  0.6 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   3068140 total,  2998572 used,    69568 free,    11516 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free.   723892 cached Mem

   PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
  3795 XXX  20   0 3125184 1.859g   9496 S  12.9 63.5 207:57.97 bitcoind

So it using all of the 3GB RAM.
I ran bitcoind once in debug mode and the last line showed it stop during a ping.  Syslog didn't show anything.
Has anyone else seen any crashes recently?  Any idea what RAM spec I should be running with?  Thanks.

[shorena]

I had a similar problem recently[1], after following the advice quoted below[2] it runs stable at ~900 MB memory usage.

See the part about transaction flooding:

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.11.0

On reddit someone set minrelaytxfee to 0.0001 (double what is suggested above) and his node is using very little RAM.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1203312.0
[2] I use minrelaytxfee = 0.00002 though

[hogwild]

I had a similar problem recently[1], after following the advice quoted below[2] it runs stable at ~900 MB memory usage.

See the part about transaction flooding:

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.11.0

On reddit someone set minrelaytxfee to 0.0001 (double what is suggested above) and his node is using very little RAM.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1203312.0
[2] I use minrelaytxfee = 0.00002 though

Interesting.  Thank you.

[hogwild]

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-node-numbers-fall-after-spam-transaction-attack/

Last week, an unknown actor sent a deluge of spam that left bitcoin's nodes – the clients that store and relay transactions – with upwards
of 88,000, or 1GB worth, waiting in their collective memory pool.

Today, despite the memory pool returning to normal (around 4MB at press time) and Core developer Jeff Garzik implementing a 'quick fix' for operators,
the total number of reachable nodes – 5,030 – remains 16% lower than before the 'attack'.

Bitcoin total number of reachable nodes   : 5030
Dash total number of active masternodes : 3274

Looks like my problem was due to an attack.  I had bumped up my node to 4GB RAM and it had stopped crashing.