Bitcoin Core 0.13 freezes Ubuntu 16

[Fenix_One]

Hello, so I have a new Dell laptop with Intel Pentium N3700, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD with Ubuntu 16. I want to use it to store cryptocurrencies. So I downloaded Bitcoin Core 0.13 and it started synchronizing. When it got to the point that ~1 year 40 weeks were left to synchronize, computer just froze, keyboard didn't respond, mouse/ touchpad didn't respond too. I had to shut down computer with power button. I ran Bitcoin Core for several more times and every time it froze after 5 - 20 min. I tried Bitcoin Core 0.12 and result was the same.
However I managed to set up Dash Core (I am not trying to promote Dash here) and wallet for another coin and it downloaded both blockchains without problem.
Should I try older version of Bitcoin Core? But would that be safe? I guess I can use Electrum or other wallet but I wanted to use the "real" thing.

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[achow101]

The Bitcoin blockchain is much larger and requires more processing power to process than most altcoins.

How much free space do you have on that hard drive before you started Bitcoin Core?

Can you please post the debug.log file?

[rally]

Hello, so I have a new Dell laptop with Intel Pentium N3700, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD with Ubuntu 16. I want to use it to store cryptocurrencies. So I downloaded Bitcoin Core 0.13 and it started synchronizing. When it got to the point that ~1 year 40 weeks were left to synchronize, computer just froze, keyboard didn't respond, mouse/ touchpad didn't respond too. I had to shut down computer with power button. I ran Bitcoin Core for several more times and every time it froze after 5 - 20 min. I tried Bitcoin Core 0.12 and result was the same.
However I managed to set up Dash Core (I am not trying to promote Dash here) and wallet for another coin and it downloaded both blockchains without problem.
Should I try older version of Bitcoin Core? But would that be safe? I guess I can use Electrum or other wallet but I wanted to use the "real" thing.

I am now donwloading the blockchain of bitcoin core. At this moment i a only twee weeks behind. If i look at my harddisk i now use already 97.5 GB. I use the lastest version i think Bitcoin core 0.13.1. Is it possible perhaps that you don't have enough free space anymore on your harddisk. That's why i did buy an external harddisk to put the blockchain on it. I have been downloading now for a good two weeks (about 5 hours a day).

[Fenix_One]

The Bitcoin blockchain is much larger and requires more processing power to process than most altcoins.

How much free space do you have on that hard drive before you started Bitcoin Core?

Can you please post the debug.log file?

Thanks for the answer. Laptop is new, so there is essentially 500 GB free space, basically I don't have anything else on that laptop .
I figured out that maybe that freeze was due to overheating, because that freeze happened after laptop was already working on blockchain for several hours.
I will try to find debug.log file and post it.

[Fenix_One]

Hello, so I have a new Dell laptop with Intel Pentium N3700, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD with Ubuntu 16. I want to use it to store cryptocurrencies. So I downloaded Bitcoin Core 0.13 and it started synchronizing. When it got to the point that ~1 year 40 weeks were left to synchronize, computer just froze, keyboard didn't respond, mouse/ touchpad didn't respond too. I had to shut down computer with power button. I ran Bitcoin Core for several more times and every time it froze after 5 - 20 min. I tried Bitcoin Core 0.12 and result was the same.
However I managed to set up Dash Core (I am not trying to promote Dash here) and wallet for another coin and it downloaded both blockchains without problem.
Should I try older version of Bitcoin Core? But would that be safe? I guess I can use Electrum or other wallet but I wanted to use the "real" thing.

I am now donwloading the blockchain of bitcoin core. At this moment i a only twee weeks behind. If i look at my harddisk i now use already 97.5 GB. I use the lastest version i think Bitcoin core 0.13.1. Is it possible perhaps that you don't have enough free space anymore on your harddisk. That's why i did buy an external harddisk to put the blockchain on it. I have been downloading now for a good two weeks (about 5 hours a day).

Thanks for the answer. I don't have anything else on that laptop so I have almost 500 GB free space on hard disk.
Now I think that freeze could have been due to overheating.
But two weeks for downloading blockchain - that sounds like a lot. What kind of CPU and how much RAM do you have on your computer?

[achow101]

Thanks for the answer. Laptop is new, so there is essentially 500 GB free space, basically I don't have anything else on that laptop .
I figured out that maybe that freeze was due to overheating, because that freeze happened after laptop was already working on blockchain for several hours.
I will try to find debug.log file and post it.

Bitcoin Core is also extremely hardware intensive. You seem to have fairly low end hardware so Bitcoin Core will probably not run as well as you want it to.

[CoralPay]

You need good amount of HDD spaces. It's hardware intensive.

[Fenix_One]

It looks like the problem is not due to overheating after all because now it occurs after relatively short period of time and laptop doesn't feel that hot.

[Fenix_One]

The Bitcoin blockchain is much larger and requires more processing power to process than most altcoins.

How much free space do you have on that hard drive before you started Bitcoin Core?

Can you please post the debug.log file?

When I try to view debug.log I get this:
There was a problem opening the file “/home/l5/.bitcoin/debug.log”. The file you opened has some invalid characters. If you continue editing this file you could corrupt this document.
You can also choose another character encoding and try again.

Retry Edit anyway Cancel

What should I do?

And there is lot of text - should I just copy/paste it here?

[achow101]

When I try to view debug.log I get this:
There was a problem opening the file “/home/l5/.bitcoin/debug.log”. The file you opened has some invalid characters. If you continue editing this file you could corrupt this document.
You can also choose another character encoding and try again.

Retry Edit anyway Cancel

What should I do?

Edit anyway. Don't actually edit anything and don't save anything when you close the file.

And there is lot of text - should I just copy/paste it here?

Yes. If it is too much for here, copy and paste it into a new paste on http://pastebin.com/ and post the link. If it is still too much for that, just paste as much as you can from the bottom of the file.

[Zz]

Thanks for the answer. Laptop is new, so there is essentially 500 GB free space, basically I don't have anything else on that laptop .
I figured out that maybe that freeze was due to overheating, because that freeze happened after laptop was already working on blockchain for several hours.
I will try to find debug.log file and post it.

How did you partition the disk?
How much do you separate? To / home directory
Switch to root account
You have tried the following commands.
Write the output on this subject.

fdisk -l /dev/sda

df -h

find / -name ".bitcoin" -type d

[Fenix_One]

When I try to view debug.log I get this:
There was a problem opening the file “/home/l5/.bitcoin/debug.log”. The file you opened has some invalid characters. If you continue editing this file you could corrupt this document.
You can also choose another character encoding and try again.

Retry Edit anyway Cancel

What should I do?

Edit anyway. Don't actually edit anything and don't save anything when you close the file.

And there is lot of text - should I just copy/paste it here?

Yes. If it is too much for here, copy and paste it into a new paste on http://pastebin.com/ and post the link. If it is still too much for that, just paste as much as you can from the bottom of the file.

Here is debug.log: https://paste.ee/p/hu1JF

[Fenix_One]

Thanks for the answer. Laptop is new, so there is essentially 500 GB free space, basically I don't have anything else on that laptop .
I figured out that maybe that freeze was due to overheating, because that freeze happened after laptop was already working on blockchain for several hours.
I will try to find debug.log file and post it.

How did you partition the disk?
How much do you separate? To / home directory
Switch to root account
You have tried the following commands.
Write the output on this subject.

fdisk -l /dev/sda

df -h

find / -name ".bitcoin" -type d

Thanks for trying to help.

This is the result of fdisk -l /dev/sda:

Disk /dev/sda: 465,8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: A7869A7B-98F5-4207-BCCF-11ADFC917D47

Device       Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1     2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
/dev/sda2  1050624   2050047    999424   488M Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3  2050048 976771071 974721024 464,8G Linux filesystem


df -h:

Filesystem                   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev                         1,9G     0  1,9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                        386M  6,3M  379M   2% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root  454G   69G  363G  16% /
tmpfs                        1,9G  224K  1,9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                        5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs                        1,9G     0  1,9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda2                    473M  115M  334M  26% /boot
/dev/sda1                    511M  3,6M  508M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs                        386M   56K  385M   1% /run/user/1000


find / -name ".bitcoin" -type d
results in
find: ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied

[Fenix_One]

Now Bitcoin Core totally freezes Ubuntu after downloading 3-5 days' worth of data.
It is actually downloading blocks quite rapidly until it freezes.
CPU usage for bitcoin-qt while it is working is more than 300% most of the time according to "top" (Pentium N3700 has 4 cores).

[KingDice]

4GB RAM? Sounds extremely low, please start bitcoin again and before it crashes run free -m , also install iotop and run it and make a screenshot. I don't think  that its HDD, mostly RAM, and maybe CPU. If you want to understand better about CPU and processes download HTOP which is easier to use for non-experienced users. I would say most probably its CPU+RAM and maybe you will need to give bitcoin process lower priority and disable memory cache  so that it doesn't crash the whole system

[Fenix_One]

4GB RAM? Sounds extremely low, please start bitcoin again and before it crashes run free -m , also install iotop and run it and make a screenshot. I don't think  that its HDD, mostly RAM, and maybe CPU. If you want to understand better about CPU and processes download HTOP which is easier to use for non-experienced users. I would say most probably its CPU+RAM and maybe you will need to give bitcoin process lower priority and disable memory cache  so that it doesn't crash the whole system

Thanks for the answer.
With free -m I get this:
                    total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3850        1799         275          93        1775        1679
Swap:          3995         188        3807

Does that mean almost all memory is used? Only 275 MB free.

"maybe you will need to give bitcoin process lower priority and disable memory cache  so that it doesn't crash the whole system"
How do I do that?

This is screenshot from iotop:
http://imgur.com/a/rn2TO

[KingDice]

Okay, no it doesn't mean that you only have 256 free. Memory and iotop seems fine, but is bitcoin running for few minutes before it crashes? Also share you bitcoin.conf(we want the "dbcache=" variable) file please. Also, print screen your HTOP or TOP -c command output

[Fenix_One]

Okay, no it doesn't mean that you only have 256 free. Memory and iotop seems fine, but is bitcoin running for few minutes before it crashes? Also share you bitcoin.conf(we want the "dbcache=" variable) file please. Also, print screen your HTOP or TOP -c command output

Bitcoin Core just froze Ubuntu again, it had been running for about an hour, more often it happens after 15-20 minutes. I was able to download blockchain until 1 year 40 weeks were left, then this problem started.

I can't find bitcoin.conf, it should be in /home/username/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf , but it is not there.

UPDATE:
This is Bitcoin-Qt.conf file from /home/username/.config/Bitcoin :

[General]
addrProxy=127.0.0.1:9050
addrSeparateProxyTor=127.0.0.1:9050
bSpendZeroConfChange=true
fCoinControlFeatures=false
fFeeSectionMinimized=true
fHideTrayIcon=false
fListen=true
fMinimizeOnClose=false
fMinimizeToTray=false
fPayOnlyMinFee=false
fReset=false
fRestartRequired=false
fSendFreeTransactions=false
fUseProxy=false
fUseSeparateProxyTor=false
fUseUPnP=false
language=
nCustomFeeRadio=0
nDatabaseCache=300
nDisplayUnit=0
nFeeRadio=0
nRPCConsoleWindowPos=@Point(284 -4)
nRPCConsoleWindowSize=@Size(740 460)
nSettingsVersion=130100
nSmartFeeSliderPosition=0
nThreadsScriptVerif=0
nTransactionFee=0
nWindowPos=@Point(288 -4)
nWindowSize=@Size(850 550)
strDataDir=/home/l5/.bitcoin
strThirdPartyTxUrls=


This is HTOP:
http://imgur.com/a/WYHGX

[achow101]

Bitcoin Core just froze Ubuntu again, it had been running for about an hour, more often it happens after 15-20 minutes. I was able to download blockchain until 1 year 40 weeks were left, then this problem started.

I can't find bitcoin.conf, it should be in /home/username/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf , but it is not there.

UPDATE:
This is Bitcoin-Qt.conf file from /home/username/.config/Bitcoin :
[/quote]
Bitcoin-Qt.conf is not related to this. That is an internal Qt thing. The bitcoin.conf file in ~/.bitcoin does not exist unless you create it. Make a new text file and save it as ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. Then add the following line:

Code:

dbcache=200

This should lower ram usage. The sync will go slowly, but it hopefully won't freeze your computer.

[Fenix_One]

Bitcoin Core just froze Ubuntu again, it had been running for about an hour, more often it happens after 15-20 minutes. I was able to download blockchain until 1 year 40 weeks were left, then this problem started.

I can't find bitcoin.conf, it should be in /home/username/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf , but it is not there.

UPDATE:
This is Bitcoin-Qt.conf file from /home/username/.config/Bitcoin :

Bitcoin-Qt.conf is not related to this. That is an internal Qt thing. The bitcoin.conf file in ~/.bitcoin does not exist unless you create it. Make a new text file and save it as ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. Then add the following line:

Code:

dbcache=200

This should lower ram usage. The sync will go slowly, but it hopefully won't freeze your computer.

I did this but it froze again after about 20 mins.
Maybe there are bad blocks on HDD? Computer is new so I thought that was unlikely.