...

[Voktar]

...

[etotheipi]

It is strange that you didn't see the confirmations.  Do you use a non-standard Bitcoin-Qt installation?

Unfortunately, the scanning is part of the startup, which used to only take a couple minutes.  Armory will be switching over to a much quicker/better model, but it's no trivial amount of work.  But it's my top priority.  Maybe you will try it again after it's done and easier to use

Don't worry, not everyone can have a good experience with Armory.    Thanks for trying!  I'm glad you were able to get your coins out.

[BlackBison]

Same problem for me. I have just installed Armory for the first time and it has been scanning for over 1 hour now. Its not a very high spec laptop, but it does have 2GB ram so not sure what the problem is. I will update when it finishes.


This is a top priority problem I think etotheipi, many users will just close the program in frustration most likely. I will still use for long term cold storage as I don't need fast access.

Thanks for the great work on this though, absolute genius!

[picobit]

but it does have 2GB

That is not even close to being enough    You need 4-6 GB to run Armory with the current blockchain, but a less RAM hungry version is reportedly in the works.

[etotheipi]

but it does have 2GB

That is not even close to being enough    You need 4-6 GB to run Armory with the current blockchain, but a less RAM hungry version is reportedly in the works.

Yes, very much in the works.  This is one of my two major usability upgrades for Armory in the next month.

[etotheipi]

That not the problem i was having, i have a pretty decent pc (i7 with 16Gb of RAM, running Windows

In my case Armory took maybe 3 or 4 hours to scan the whole blockchain but in the end it finished the work and let me operate.

In the end, after the scan finished, i was able to create a wallet and receive some funds, all was working ok except some confirmations don't showing.

My problem is, every time i start Armory it needs to rescan the blockchain again, spending hours on it, the whole proccess again.

Sorry, english is not my natural language, maybe i'm not explaining well 

I will post the steps i follow:

1. Run Armory

2. It starts offline and being scanning the blockchain

3. After a few hours (3/4) the proccess is complete and i can operate in online mode

4. It seems all ok so i send/receibed some coins, closed the program and shut down the computer

Next day if i need to operate with the program, it needs to rescans again the whole blockchain spending another 3/4 hours in it, so it goes again to step 2.

I'm ussing the standard (official) and latests versions of the installers for both, Bitcoin-Qt and Armory, running Windows 8 and G Data Total Protection 2013 antivirus.

So don't know what the cause can be or if it's normal to took that much hours for a scan every time i run the program.

Regards.

It definitely should not take that long to scan.  On my computer, it takes about 3-5 minutes.  On my Windows VM, it's about 10 minutes.  Some people have reported 10-20 minutes.  Not ideal, but at least it's "usable."

The blockchain is not getting any smaller, and reports like this are increasing in number.  I hadn't planned to do this upgrade for a while, but Bitcoin's growth + SatoshiDice have started to hold me hostage.  That's why maintaining persistent blockchain data is top of my priority list (after I'm done with my current major upgrade).

However, you should be seeing the blockchain update.   There was a bug in 0.87 that especially affected users with long load times.  That was fixed in 0.87.2.  If it still doesn't update properly in 0.87.2... then I guess you should wait for the RAM update...

[nimda]

but it does have 2GB

That is not even close to being enough    You need 4-6 GB to run Armory with the current blockchain, but a less RAM hungry version is reportedly in the works.

Armory stores the whole blockchain in RAM? Ohgodwhy?

[etotheipi]

but it does have 2GB

That is not even close to being enough    You need 4-6 GB to run Armory with the current blockchain, but a less RAM hungry version is reportedly in the works.

Armory stores the whole blockchain in RAM? Ohgodwhy?

No it doesn't.

It only stores a transaction index to where the transactions are on disk.  But there's 10+ million transactions, with hashes 32 bytes each, 20 byte file pointers, and some extra overhead.  It's not difficult to see you're approaching the order of magnitude of its current RAM usage.

On my system, it consumes about 1.5-2 GB RAM.  It used to be 400 MB.  But the index itself is growing too fast...

[Rampion]

In case it's helpful:

I'm running Armory on a mid 2009, Core 2 Duo 2.53 Ghz Macbook Pro, with 4GB RAM and OSX 10.8.2

installed armory compiling from source following Red Emeralds instructions on a bloated set up. Took 30/40 minutes to sync in each start and kept crashing

after a clean OS install it got better: now it takes between 10 to 20 minutes to sync, and it run flawlessly unless I open too many apps/tabs in browser, etc.

It uses Aprox. 1.6gb of RAM

[BlackBison]

Ok thanks for the info guys I thought it only required 2GB, but I guess maybe that was a long time ago when the blockchain was much smaller!

[yokosan]

Having the same issues (long startup and using insane amounts of RAM)

[jl2012]

There should be a better way to deal with this. Armory should store the relevant UTXOs up to the latest bitcoind checkpoint. Therefore, it doesn't need to scan the whole blockchain every time it restarts.

[Octavian]

I also have this problem on Windows 7, 64bit with both the Bitcoin-Qt and Armory-clients installed not on default locations.
Else it works, but this constant rescanning upon each start make it practically useless for me for "fast" transactions.
For offline wallets it's ok to wait for me.

It would be great if this can be fixed, maybe by checkpointing and a Merkle tree hash upon all successfully validated transactions.

[etotheipi]

I also have this problem on Windows 7, 64bit with both the Bitcoin-Qt and Armory-clients installed not on default locations.
Else it works, but this constant rescanning upon each start make it practically useless for me for "fast" transactions.
For offline wallets it's ok to wait for me.

It would be great if this can be fixed, maybe by checkpointing and a Merkle tree hash upon all successfully validated transactions.

Don't worry guys... I know what to do   There's been a lot of life distractions, and I'm trying to finish some other Armory upgrades that both improve usability, and security.  After that (hopefully in the next couple days!) I'm going to crawl into a hole for 96 hours and not come out until the the RAM usage is reduced and the blockchain doesn't require rescanning on each load. 

Right now, Armory is still an advanced tool.  I haven't made it a priority, because I wanted to focus on unique features that no other program has, instead of having less features, but making it more usable. I'd rather have a program that 50% can't live without + 50% can't use... than a program that 95% of people can use, but don't see the advantage.  Unfortunately, that "50% can't use" is growing quickly, so that's why my priorities have shifted.

It's coming!

[nameless888]

Turns out I've been whitelisted for around a day to post in here and I didn't even notice the message saying I was....will teach me to check messages in future.

Have also had issues with armory taking ages with the blockchain, but this was just the first scanning of it. The reason I didn't get any further was because it was taking up so much resources on my laptop (T61 Thinkpad, it has dual core and thought it'd handle something like this easily, but maybe not. First time I've ever had a problem with a program slowing down like this too.) that I just had to stop trying. Couldn't really open firefox or browse properly because the whole laptop was crawling at a really slow pace. That was on windows though, and as I've already said a few times I botched a partition and have lost windows now, so maybe ubuntu will handle it better?

But either way, was just wondering how things are going with making it use less resources, and also if the scanning each time for long periods has been fixed? I'm mainly asking because I've only just started using bitcoin last night (due to partition mess though I lost my first wallet! No bunny run bitcoin bonus this time around...) but for over a week I've been reading up a decent bit and wanted to use this on a raspberry pi for cold storage once I got started after testing bitcoin out, so I knew that things were probably secure (if done properly.) from the off. Without this I don't think there's any other way of having a watching only wallet and that idea just seems like such a great way of doing things.

Thanks if you can let us know how things are going anyway, and I might try this again with ubuntu, because bitcoin-qt seems to load way faster, so maybe armory will also work this time around.

[picobit]

My system is pretty new iCore7 (8 cores) and it has 16Gbs of RAM, sata3 drive, etc, and i have the same problem, take ages (4 to 6 hours) each time to start working online.

That is clearly unreasonable with that kind of RAM available.  I have 8GB and an SSD, it takes 3 minutes.  I would expect 4-5 with sata3 at most. 

[etotheipi]

My system is pretty new iCore7 (8 cores) and it has 16Gbs of RAM, sata3 drive, etc, and i have the same problem, take ages (4 to 6 hours) each time to start working online.

That is clearly unreasonable with that kind of RAM available.  I have 8GB and an SSD, it takes 3 minutes.  I would expect 4-5 with sata3 at most. 

There's clearly something that is going wrong on some systems.  Even my OSX, Win7 and Ubuntu VMs, which are on old-school platter HDDs and 4GB of RAM take 4-6 minutes. 

I don't mean to discount the necessity of the upcoming upgrades to avoid the scanning entirely ... that's in the works, regardless.  But there is something wrong if it takes that long.  Can you try the new version and tell me if really takes that long consistently through the scanning (because there's no a progress bar), or if it goes through scanning and then hangs for that long?

Also, if you want to keep using Armory and you can't resolve this, you might consider deleting the Bitcoin-Qt datadir, and letting it redownload... which should take about 4-6 hours!  So you wouldn't really be losing any time...

[ErebusBat]

FWIW I just redownloaded the blockchain with a scent connection to a LAN bitcoind and it took closer to 48hrs.

[logicbomb666]

I am having the same issue listed above.  My armory client sits with the screen shot posted below indefinitely.




I have removed all files from the bitcoin home directly with exception to the wallet.dat.  Armory re-scanned the block-chain from the start, and once it gets to 99% it just sits there forever.  Does anyone have any other ways to try and resolve this issue?

My current setup:
Win7 Ultimate SP1 64 bit
8GB RAM
1TB Cavier Black HDD
50/25 mbps fiber connection


Armory 0.88.1
Bitcoinqt 0.8.1-beta

[logicbomb666]

After making my post-

I closed Armory completely, opened Bitcoinqt, then opened Armory while Bitcoinqt was still running.  I used the button in Armory to close bitcoinqt and then rescan.  This fixed my issue.  It might help others.