Re: [Solved] Application not responding

[jim618]

This is a reply to 21after2's post which is locked.

I have been working this week on fixing a particular deadlock - which is what you experienced. This code will appear in the next release. One of the main drivers for putting in the rolling backups was so that you would always have a good copy of your wallets if you had to force quit.

What causes deadlocks ?
MultiBit has a number of separate threads all of which have to cooperate. If you imagine separate workers in a factory:
+ each connection to a bitcoind is a separate worker.
+ there is a manager overseeing these connections
+ one worker draws everything on the screen
+ one worker keeps track on when the wallets are dirty and regularly writes them to disk
+ there are other specialised workers for various things.

A deadlock happens typically when Worker A is waiting for Worker B and Worker B is waiting for Worker A. Neither can progress. As Java is a managed environment you can get quite detailed information about the status of the threads to fix these problems so I should be able to gradually iron all these out.

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[21after2]

Sorry I didn't notice your response until just now! It's awesome to hear of the rolling backups too! I had been in the middle of a large transfer that had me a bit paranoid.

You must be doing a good job ironing them out since that's the only issue I've ever had with the client and I've yet to experience it since then. Keep up the good work!

[jim618]

Thanks !

I think I will do something similar with the multibit.properties as very occasionally people lose their settings.
(it is not so drastic as they can always redo everything but still disconcerting).

Stability and reliability are probably as important now as adding more functionality as more people download MultiBit.

[21after2]

I imagine downloads must be way up with the price of Bitcoin being what it is right now. I know it's what I always recommend people to use.

[jim618]

Cheers for the recommendations !

Snce the Reddit / Mega news last weekend the MultiBit downloads have averaged 10 GB a day this week (about 400 a day) :
https://multibit.org/awstats/awstats.pl?config=multibit.org

Blockchain.info is adding about 1,000 wallets a day:
http://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users

The bitcoind v0.8 downloads are running at 4000 a day
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.0/stats/timeline

I don't know of any other download stats for other wallets.
There are a lot of people upgrading and duplicate downloads but we must be somewhere around 50,000 people a month trying out a Bitcoin wallet now.

[21after2]

Those are statistics that I like to hear! The state of Bitcoin when I joined a few months ago seems insignificant compared to how it is now. It's a lot of growth in such a short period of time... I just hope we're not heading for another burst.