Help please, Armory crashing constantly.

[simmo77]

Hi,

I've been using Armory for a while now and I really like it, but I'm suffering from the same issue that is affecting a number of other users. I'm at the end of my tether now, not having access to my BTC has started to cost me money in the form of missed opportunities. I monitor the market closely, but when my wallet isn't accessible this counts for nothing as I am not able to respond quickly (or at all) to any bull/bear runs, news, etc etc. I don't want my BTC sitting on any exchange for any amount of time, so I need a usable wallet app!



Armory crashes on startup (always) while scanning my transaction history - it actually stops responding, doesn't terminate, it just sits there using a constant amount of CPU time (but no additional RAM). I have left it for ~48 hours in this state hoping the transaction scan might finish - no dice.
It's absolutely got it's knickers in a knot about one of my wallets and just refuses to play. I'm close to exporting my keys and moving to another app, but I really like Armory's security features.


I've tried a number of things to get access to my wallets:

1 - I was using Armory 0.88.1-beta 64 bit on my PC with 4GB RAM, and experiencing occasional issues with crashing during the scan of transaction history. Usually a reboot would fix it.
2 - Upgraded to 0.90-beta and also upgraded my PC RAM to 16GB - no issues for a number of months.
3 - Recently, crashing issues came back and were not resolvable by a reboot. Only change has been the creation of a new wallet (which has only 1 transaction).
4 - I trawled through the forums and tried multiple things to resolve the issue:
4a - Armory starts fine in Offline mode and wallet details are accessible in the application.
4b - I tried both Rescanning Databases, and Rebuild and Rescan from the help menu - no dice.
4c - I tried manually renaming the Armory database folder to .old and letting Armory recreate it's database from scratch - no dice.
4d - I tried deleting Armory totally on that PC, deleting the Armory folder from my Appdata\Roaming\Armory and reinstalling and restoring my wallets from paper backup - no dice.
5 - Tried a fresh install of Armory 0.90-beta on a fresh Windows 7 VM, even allowed it to download the entire blockchain (I'm a patient man).
5a - Tried creating a fresh wallet on the new install, which was successful (predictably).
5b - Tried importing one of my three wallets from paper backup (yay Armory), allowed it to check the transaction history -> back to the same old story (no dice).
5c - I reverted to an earlier snapshot on that VM and did another fresh install, tried importing another of my wallets (with fewer transactions) -> no dice.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Simmo

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[Zoella]

+1

It's been weeks since I've been able to access my wallets reliably. Everything works until I import my wallets. Since I don't send often, I haven't been too worried about it. But now it's just getting ridiculous.

[Rock6.3]

No responses from emails sent to the Armory support address either

[Rock6.3]

If I run Armory it eventually crashes or claims that the BitCoinQT is not up to date.
If I run the BitCoinQT first, get it up to date, then open Armory, let Armory close the QT, Armory crunches for an hour or more, then goes non-responsive, then crashes.

Support email from Tuesday:  No response
Support email from Wednesday: No response
Forum posts from Thursday: No response

I don't expect instant support, but does this response time meet the objectives of the founders of this product?

[simmo77]

I suspect (like a lot of other Bitcoin apps and services out there) they've grown too quickly, been inundated with customers and have too many support cases to handle.

[cbeast]

A quick search on the forum reveals this: https://bitcoinarmory.com/download/troubleshooting/

I don't use Armory yet, but it looks good.

[Rock6.3]

A quick search on the forum reveals this: https://bitcoinarmory.com/download/troubleshooting/

I don't use Armory yet, but it looks good.

Good try, but I have no success in repairing my Armory install using those links.

And still no response to tech support email sent on Tuesday.

[simmo77]

A quick search on the forum reveals this: https://bitcoinarmory.com/download/troubleshooting/

I don't use Armory yet, but it looks good.

Yeah I've been there and checked all of this stuff - no dice.

If you read the steps I went through in my original post, I'm pretty sure I covered everything suggested on the troubleshooting page. Thanks anyway though.

A response from the dev/support team would be nice, even if it's just "send us the logs/we're working on it/wait till the next version/whatever".

[papamoi]

having same issues here

[idoB]

I'm running Armory on a 2GB windows 64bit machine, and it does plenty besides running armory.

Here's my step by step suggestions:

• Delete Bitcoin-qt from the control panel
• Delete Armory
• Install latest bitcoin-qt. 0.9.0 rc3 can be found on sourceforge
• Run bitcoin-qt, wait till it completely syncs. Do not continue until you get the green checkbox at bottom right
• Install latest version of Armory 0.9 beta, for win64.
• In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox
• Under Help click 'rebuild and rescan databases'
• Restart Armory
• Let it run - it might take two days to build its database from scratch

[simmo77]

Thanks idoB - pretty sure what I did at step 5 covered this off though...

5 - Tried a fresh install of Armory 0.90-beta on a fresh Windows 7 VM, even allowed it to download the entire blockchain (I'm a patient man).

[Rock6.3]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

[idoB]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

[Rock6.3]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

This is a fresh Win7 build, not a VM

[idoB]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

This is a fresh Win7 build, not a VM

OK. At what stage does windows kill armory?
Is bitcoin-qt running in background, fully synced?
Did armory complete building the database? You can tell if that's so by looking at the leveldb-blkdata directory and checking the properties. As of now it should contain 9,968 files. So upwards of that number.

Also could you report with what event viewer is logging? For that, click start-Administrative tools-event viewer. When it comes up, under windows logs-applications there should be an error entry complaining about the fault.
F

[Rock6.3]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

This is a fresh Win7 build, not a VM

OK. At what stage does windows kill armory?
Is bitcoin-qt running in background, fully synced?
Did armory complete building the database? You can tell if that's so by looking at the leveldb-blkdata directory and checking the properties. As of now it should contain 9,968 files. So upwards of that number.

Also could you report with what event viewer is logging? For that, click start-Administrative tools-event viewer. When it comes up, under windows logs-applications there should be an error entry complaining about the fault.
F

At what stage does windows kill armory? After full sync, and transaction log scan, reporting Armory as Online
Is bitcoin-qt running in background, fully synced? Yes
Did armory complete building the database? Yes

I'll run the process again tomorrow and check the error entry and post results

[simmo77]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

Don't think running it on a VM would have any detrimental effect, but anyway - I did install it on another PC I have. It's not a fresh Windows 7 x64 build, but has never had Armory installed on it before. I'm not rebuilding it for the sake of troubleshooting Armory.

Had an old BitCoin application installed already so I let it synch the blockchain fully, then did a fresh install of Armory 0.90-beta. Allowed it complete it's database build and all looked fine, connected and online.

Wallet import of a small wallet (1 transaction) worked OK, it scanned successfully and Armory was responding afterwards.

Imported my main "spending account" wallet (lots more transactions, but probably under 100), Armory rescanned and went unresponsive.
Windows event viewer simply reports it as an "Application Hang Event ID: 1002. The program ArmoryQt.exe version 0.0.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed."

[idoB]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

Don't think running it on a VM would have any detrimental effect, but anyway - I did install it on another PC I have. It's not a fresh Windows 7 x64 build, but has never had Armory installed on it before. I'm not rebuilding it for the sake of troubleshooting Armory.

Had an old BitCoin application installed already so I let it synch the blockchain fully, then did a fresh install of Armory 0.90-beta. Allowed it complete it's database build and all looked fine, connected and online.

Wallet import of a small wallet (1 transaction) worked OK, it scanned successfully and Armory was responding afterwards.

Imported my main "spending account" wallet (lots more transactions, but probably under 100), Armory rescanned and went unresponsive.
Windows event viewer simply reports it as an "Application Hang Event ID: 1002. The program ArmoryQt.exe version 0.0.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed."

OK, that's progress - so Armory worked on a small wallet, and when you tried to import a larger one it hanged.

Here are a few things that I'd try:

• Go to the offline computer and redo the export wallet and retry to import it to the online computer. That will exclude the possibility that the wallet file was corrupt in a way that Armory can't handle gracefully.
• Sometimes application hangs (ID 1002) are caused by an antivirus program. Could you disable for this test and try again?
• If above doesn't make a difference, post (or at least examine yourself) the Armory log file. In Armory choose File-Export log file. That can hint with more specifics what internally happened.

[goatpig]

In File-settings clear 'let armory run bitcoin-qt' checkbox

Great idea.

But it failed.  Armory still goes non-responsive and is killed by Windows.

Difference may be the VM. Have you tried all that on a freshly installed windows on a dedicated machine?

Don't think running it on a VM would have any detrimental effect, but anyway - I did install it on another PC I have. It's not a fresh Windows 7 x64 build, but has never had Armory installed on it before. I'm not rebuilding it for the sake of troubleshooting Armory.

Had an old BitCoin application installed already so I let it synch the blockchain fully, then did a fresh install of Armory 0.90-beta. Allowed it complete it's database build and all looked fine, connected and online.

Wallet import of a small wallet (1 transaction) worked OK, it scanned successfully and Armory was responding afterwards.

Imported my main "spending account" wallet (lots more transactions, but probably under 100), Armory rescanned and went unresponsive.
Windows event viewer simply reports it as an "Application Hang Event ID: 1002. The program ArmoryQt.exe version 0.0.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed."

Sounds like a ledger issue that we fixed recently. Quite a lot of fixes will be bundled with the next release. It's coming soon so hang in there.

[simmo77]

Thanks Goatpig.