Bitcoin client causing 1-2MB/s disk writes on OS X

[ashmoran]

Hi

Hello everyone. First post so this has to go in the newbie section.

I'm running the standard Bitcoin.app 0.3.23 on OS X 10.6.7. I have to turn it off between transactions because it completely strangles my hard drive: it causes several MB/s reads, and 1-2MB/s writes, consistently.

I've used fseventer to see what's going on, and it's touching a huge number of the bands in my home folder's encrypted sparsebundle (I've got FileVault turned on).

Has anybody else seen this, and does anybody know what's causing it? I had a quick search but I couldn't see any answers.

Cheers
Ash

[Opsamk]

Store your block data file elsewhere.

[ashmoran]

Is there an easy way to do this? There are no preferences in Bitcoin.app to choose the location of the block data.

[ashmoran]

So I dug into the command line options, and then found this thread: client command line option -wallet= in addition to -datadir=?

Basically there's no easy way to run the standard Bitcoin.app (ie the Mac app) with the data directory in a different location, and even on the command line, there's no way to specify a different location for the wallet.

Does anyone see this as an issue? As it stands, running the app on a Mac with FileVault basically renders the machine unusable. I don't know what it's like on an SSD, but I suspect it could drastically shorten the life of the drive.

I'm trying to imagine getting my mum to use Bitcoin, and having to explain why her hard drive is constantly clicking and her machine slows down when it's open. I'm trying not to imagine telling her how to run the app from the command line with a wallet symlinked to a different location.

[BombaUcigasa]

This is a big issue for me as well, during my regular gameplay I get framerate spikes due to randomly occuring 2-3mb reads and writes in the database files. Is this really needed? Why doesn't the OS cache smoothen up the disk operations?

[ashmoran]

I've just upgraded to Lion, and switching from the old to the new FileVault has solved the disk access problem. It's now down from several MB/s to on average about 200kB/s.

I think the problem before was that with Legacy FileVault, the large size of the block chain file meant it was repeatedly writing many home folder disk image bands. With the new full-disk encryption FileVault, that doesn't happen.