[2015-10-15] Bitcoin Node Numbers Fall After Spam Transaction 'Attack'

[OmegaStarScream]

The number of reachable nodes has declined further following an "attack" that overloaded the bitcoin network.

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.

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

[DooMAD]

For all the arguments that claim an increase in blocksize would be detrimental to the node count, it seems no increase at all would be equally bad in that regard.  The sooner we find a compromise, the better.  Not so high as to threaten the bandwidth limitations of those running nodes, but not so low as to fill the mempool to the point where their hardware can't cope with the backlog.  We need a happy medium.

[freedomno1]

Killing nodes is an unfortunate side-effect of Spam Txts
"Eventually, the transaction backlog fills-up the RAM memory of the nodes. This causes the node computers to slow down dramatically or even freeze-up. If a node slows down too much, the bitcoin network considers it to be ineffective and 'offline'. My guess is that most of the offline nodes just stop functioning well enough to respond."