All,
Very recently I have run into an issue with my bitcoin daemon. I am wondering if it might have to do with the pool software I'm running on top of it, and will likely ask this same question if I can find a forum thread for the pool
. Here's what I notice:
1) I start up the bitcoin daemon process and all is happy.
2) After about 24 hours, the process becomes completely unresponsive. Typing:
Or any other command just hangs without returning.
3) This causes all kinds of havoc on my pool. Website runs exceptionally slow. I get bombarded with mail from the cron jobs saying they're already running. Things like that. When I look at my debug.log, all I see is it trying to create new blocks:
2015-12-03 12:26:06 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998979
2015-12-03 12:26:12 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998945
2015-12-03 12:26:18 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998993
2015-12-03 12:26:24 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998883
2015-12-03 12:26:30 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998978
2015-12-03 12:26:36 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998837
2015-12-03 12:26:42 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998842
2015-12-03 12:26:48 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998971
2015-12-03 12:26:54 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998913
2015-12-03 12:26:58 keypool reserve 3
2015-12-03 12:26:58 keypool return 3
2015-12-03 12:27:00 CreateNewBlock(): total size 998914
The fact that it's trying to create a new block every 6 seconds seems a bit odd, but looking at the log shows that is pretty consistently happening, even when things are running smoothly.
My only recourse is to kill the process and restart it. Doing so makes everything run smoothly once again. Once restarted, I can see typically "normal" things in the log:
015-12-03 13:00:45 CreateNewBlock(): total size 696619
2015-12-03 13:00:48 ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool: nonstandard transaction: dust
2015-12-03 13:00:48 ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool: free transaction rejected by rate limiter
2015-12-03 13:00:52 CreateNewBlock(): total size 701939
2015-12-03 13:00:53 ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool: free transaction rejected by rate limiter
2015-12-03 13:00:56 ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool: free transaction rejected by rate limiter
2015-12-03 13:00:58 CreateNewBlock(): total size 707323
2015-12-03 13:00:59 ERROR: AcceptToMemoryPool: free transaction rejected by rate limiter
2015-12-03 13:01:03 CreateNewBlock(): total size 719860
By the way, I'm running 0.11.2 compiled and built from source on Ubuntu 15.10. Pool is running MPOS/NOMP. Processes are running on a 4 core box with 8G RAM. Looking at CPU usage, bitcoind is about 150% or more when it is unresponsive. Typically it ranges anywhere from 30% to 80%.
I'm wondering if having a max block size of 1M is causing problems. If you look at the two log snippets I included above, when it was completely unresponsive, all it was doing was trying to create new blocks of max size (or very close to it). When things are running smoothly, the blocks its trying to create are considerably smaller.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
