Bitcoin Qt wallet (win32 & 64) more and more corruption problems and reindexing

[induktor]

Hello
I've been using bitcoin since 2012, until version 0.8.6 never have any problems with the wallet, I have 3 bitcoin qt wallet (full node), 2 are win 64 and 1 is win 32 (since i run it from a vmware virtual machine with xp)

starting with version 0.10 the problem begins to get serious, every other week i get database corruption, or some other random error, i have to close the wallet and open it again, and...yes.... as you may guess... reindexing!!!!! geez!

reindexing takes a ridiculous amount of time, I am talking about 4 Hours, on a A8 7600 (quad core) with 8GB 1866 memory and Intel SSD, the reindex process does not use all the cpu nor the hard drive speed capacity (I can see SSD queue below 0.4 all the time).

this problem is totally random, error messages varies, but the result is always the same, we have to reindex.
can this be fix somehow?.

I know it's not my computer because this issue happens on three different machines, one is virtual under vmware ESX, one is XP the rest is win 7 64 bit, and no I don't have virus or malware, i can detect a malware/virus a mile away.

my coding skills are not enough to help to find the problem, but i will love to take a look at the wallet code because honestly, i don't trust the other ones, specially the SPV's  (except for casual usage, like the cell phone) but not to have a large amount of bitcoins on it.

aside from the random database corruption, is there is a way to speed up the reindex process?, i tried it on a eight core xeon and it takes about the same time as in the A8 , so it doesn't seems to be processor what it needs, i wouldn't mind database corruption if I can get the wallet working in less than 30 minutes, but 4 hours too much

thanks!
Indkt.

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[achow101]

Are you absolutely sure it is not hardware problems? Have you run hardware diagnostics on all of your computers?

Also, are you shutting down Bitcoin Core properly? If it does not shutdown properly, then you will need to reindex the databases. Also try reinstalling Bitcoin Core and use the latest version, 0.11.1.

[induktor]

Are you absolutely sure it is not hardware problems? Have you run hardware diagnostics on all of your computers?

Also, are you shutting down Bitcoin Core properly? If it does not shutdown properly, then you will need to reindex the databases. Also try reinstalling Bitcoin Core and use the latest version, 0.11.1.

Hello, thanks for answering, yes I am shutting down the wallet properly, wait for the closing dialog to disappear and wait an extra 10 seconds before power off.

100% sure, computers are OK, i do this for a living, i know computer hardware like the back of my hand, and I am pretty good solving computing problems, specially removing malware and virus by hand

The machines, even if they are not top notch, they are all decent quality/brand, all SSD samsung 840 pro and intel, all gigabyte high class machines, the older one probably has 7 or 8 months old, it is all AMD cpus since i don't trust intel hardware much, bad experiences.

the last crash happened today, on a machine i installed a week ago, and has practically no use, since i use it as a media center, so i don't go online with that machine ever.

that's why i decide to post, because this is getting too frequent, also several friends of mine started to have the same problems since 0.10 wallets about once a months at least.

I will try to compile it myself, to see if there is any difference, and I will try the linux version, but my experience on virtual machines with bitcoin qt is very crappy, for some reason is slow as hell to update!, which does not happen on the physical machine.

thanks
Indkt.

[2112]

Are your Windows installations relatively clean (of 3rd party utilities) or are you using e.g. same antivirus on all installations? Bugs in online antivirus programs are the most frequent issue with database-heavy applications, not just Bitcoin Core. Some antivirus engines automatically recognize popular database engines (e.g. MSSQL,Oracle,Sybase,...) and self-disable themselves on database files.

Edit: The most common corruption is in the "chainstate" directory. You can save yourself a lot of reindexing time by doing a backup of those directories using e.g. 7zip in "synchronize files" mode. In case of corruption just restore the known good chainstate and the reindexing will pickup near the end and will finish quicker.

[achow101]

Are you absolutely sure it is not hardware problems? Have you run hardware diagnostics on all of your computers?

Also, are you shutting down Bitcoin Core properly? If it does not shutdown properly, then you will need to reindex the databases. Also try reinstalling Bitcoin Core and use the latest version, 0.11.1.

Hello, thanks for answering, yes I am shutting down the wallet properly, wait for the closing dialog to disappear and wait an extra 10 seconds before power off.

100% sure, computers are OK, i do this for a living, i know computer hardware like the back of my hand, and I am pretty good solving computing problems, specially removing malware and virus by hand

The machines, even if they are not top notch, they are all decent quality/brand, all SSD samsung 840 pro and intel, all gigabyte high class machines, the older one probably has 7 or 8 months old, it is all AMD cpus since i don't trust intel hardware much, bad experiences.

the last crash happened today, on a machine i installed a week ago, and has practically no use, since i use it as a media center, so i don't go online with that machine ever.

that's why i decide to post, because this is getting too frequent, also several friends of mine started to have the same problems since 0.10 wallets about once a months at least.

I will try to compile it myself, to see if there is any difference, and I will try the linux version, but my experience on virtual machines with bitcoin qt is very crappy, for some reason is slow as hell to update!, which does not happen on the physical machine.

thanks
Indkt.

Interesting. Are you sure that you don't have anything that could be writing into the Data directory while Bitcoin Core is running? Anything that does could be messing it up. Also, do as 2112 said and run backups of your Data directory frequently so that if/when it gets corrupted, you can restore a clean one which will only take a few minutes to get back up to sync.

[induktor]

Thank you both for taking the time to see my problem, really.
2112 excelent tip!!, backing up the chainstate is a lot less than the whole blockchain, is 1.5Gb vs 60Gb !.

I usually do a complete backup of the entire bitcoin directory (blockchain included, so around 60 Gb now) every three months and move to cold storage, but it takes a lot of time. (because it is not only copy, I am quite paranoid about silent data corruption, after a couple of cases i had in one of my servers in 2014), so now, before copy y do a SHA1 checksum of everything, copy and verify on destination, so it takes a LOOONG time, even at eSATA speeds and remember that i have three separate wallets, so it is not 60Gb it is 180Gb!

I don't use antivirus software or malware software, i found it totally unnecessary , I do a full HDD image of every machine I have once a year, so if something goes out of control i got a quick solution.

I will start doing more frequent backups of the entire blockchain but the solution of backing up just the chainstate is fantastic!!!! thank you.

[2112]

I don't use antivirus software or malware software, i found it totally unnecessary , I do a full HDD image of every machine I have once a year, so if something goes out of control i got a quick solution.

OK, so actually you are dependent on the 3rd party utility for the integrity of your Windows installations. In that case probably all of them are corrupted in the same way somewhere in registry or low-level disk/controller drivers or other places that don't undergo integrity checking when cloning.
 
In the past we (my corp.) had site-license customers where the entire corporation was unable to successfully run our software. The thorough investigation had shown that all the failing machines were installed using some imaging software (Norton Ghost/Clone? for desktops, some vendor specific (Samsung Recovery Solution?) for laptops). Doing a clean install from the Microsoft distribution media miraculously cured all the problems.

I'm very suspect of the system maintenance practices in the Windows market segment since I learned the inside scoop about bankruptcy of 3dfx. Near the end all of their official corporate system images were having undetected corruption issues and the only the few developers who could do work were those who bough retail boxed Microsoft media. That was despite having spent literally millions on internal Windows IT management and consulting.

My corp. internally used Acronis and as far as I know they still haven't fixed the bugs I submitted to them years ago regarding imaging NTFS disks with files processed with some old Microsoft consumer photo editing software, which creates complex NTFS alternate streams. Edit: found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Picture_It!
 

[induktor]

Hi 2112 thank you for your reply, i missed it! (had an accident and been away for a while, and when i came back i didn't check the forum sorry)

I finally nailed it.
Newer versions of bitcoin-qt requires POWER and MEMORY BADLY.
3GB not enough, absolute minimun 4GB
also newer versions don't like 32 bit OS's

I moved my two most important wallets to bigger machines (A8 quadcore, with 16GB ram 64 bit windows 7) and never again any problem, still they take a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and processing power but that's because the amount of transactions skyrocketed and running a full node is not longer easy like it used to be but that is the price of the coin being adopted massively right?.
I think I will keep 1 qt wallet and use light wallets for the rest of the accounts
thank you!