Armory - Discussion Thread

[Rock6.3]

Ugh, looks like it worked, but your blockchain wasn't fully up to date.  The 0.4 left is the last three outputs received by that address.

Also, I can see that you did fall into this category I asked about (users don't always know if they are in this category).  Each transaction received by that address has tons of outputs.  The first one has 1,400 TxOuts of which you are only one.

Armory has a known inefficiency when it comes to transactions that huge, and you have a wallet full of them, so that's as bad as it gets.  The good news is most of the processing that's slowing it down turns out to be non-critical (it's for associating address and tx labels with the rows in the ledger), but still important.  We might see if we can find a way to disable it on wallets in this category, of if maybe we can just find a more efficient way of doing it.

For now, sweeping should work as long as Armory is fully synchronized.  Scanning the blockchain to sweep the addresses should work at "normal" speed, it's just populating the main window ledger that takes forever and Armory trips over itself while it waits.

If I understand your statement correctly, you are saying that Armory is a bad wallet choice for mining pool participants who are paid out in batches.

I guess it depends on what mining pool. My wallet that collects my Eligius payouts has been OK (but I will have to import and check again). The addresses I'm having problems with in this wallet are scrypt coin switching pools (PoolWaffle, Middlecoin, etc.).

I would definitely think resolving this would be a priority since so many of these types of pools have popped up recently. Then again, it may just be my bias reflected by me being caught in the situation. Definitely not fun.

I do hope it is a priority since I mine on WafflePool and my Armory BTC Wallet is broken.

[Zoella]

Just an update, I was able to completely sweep another key last night. There may be other issues with the sweep function though (unless it is simply the batch transaction issue again), but I can only do one key at a time, and I have to restart Armory in-between attempts. For some reason, I have not been able to succeed at sweeping multiple keys in a single go, nor any keys after a successful sweep. Hopefully I can finish up today though, thanks for all the help!

Did you try using the "Multiple Keys" sweep option at the top?  It was designed for this

If you don't mind doing one test for us, I just pushed the disablecomments branch to the BitcoinArmory repo.  I removed all the logic I think is slowing you down.  If our hypothesis is right, this will work.  This is the best I can do without getting your watching-only wallet.  


P.S. --

I really appreciate you being so patient!  Seriously, thanks.  Hopefully, as we go back through some other support requests, we'll see that most of them are due to this.  Admittedly, I don't do any mining, or have any enormous tx like this in my ledger (and apparently no one on our team, either).  Also, this did come up 18 months ago, and I made a huge efficiency fix that was supposed to fix it.  But apparently not efficient enough...

I did try the multiple keys, but everything just always timed out/crashed.

I can confirm there are still problems with the sweep (before your disablecomments update). I know my blockchain is up to date, but another address is failing to grab all transactions.

https://blockchain.info/address/1JkP7cCqA9bxRfzYGLLi6qTvSnQ8sx8PRm

When I try to sweep this address, Armory only sees .08330224 BTC. This is several transactions behind again, even though I know I have a sync'd chain.



I will download the update and see if that helps!

BTW, other than this one issue (which for me is an admittedly big issue), Armory is hands down my wallet preference. Hopefully a solution can be had quickly. Once I've swept the remaining coins I'd have no problem giving you the old wallet for testing if you want it, since it should still have all the old transaction issues.

[justusranvier]

Sorry in advance for being blunt, but when it comes to releasing 0.91 you guys really need to shit or get off the pot.

Right now you don't have any viable downloads on your website. The 0.8x series is too resource-intensive for most users, and 0.90 is unusably crash-prone.

A year ago, I could point people in this situation: http://www.fr33aid.com/1511/fr33-aid-bitcoins-stolen/ at your website and know they'd find something there they could download and use, but that hasn't been true for the last six months and I don't see any particular acknowledgment of this or urgency on your part.

It's not a problem for me personally since I can just grab the 0.91 branch from Git, but a lot of people who can't are losing Bitcoins because there aren't any good usable cold storage solutions any more.

New features are great to have, but they shouldn't delay you having a minimal viable product out, where "minimum viable product" is defined as "an application that lets you send and receive bitcoins from cold storage without consuming obscene amounts of RAM and also doesn't crash every few seconds."

[etotheipi]

Sorry in advance for being blunt, but when it comes to releasing 0.91 you guys really need to shit or get off the pot.

Right now you don't have any viable downloads on your website. The 0.8x series is too resource-intensive for most users, and 0.90 is unusably crash-prone.

A year ago, I could point people in this situation: http://www.fr33aid.com/1511/fr33-aid-bitcoins-stolen/ at your website and know they'd find something there they could download and use, but that hasn't been true for the last six months and I don't see any particular acknowledgment of this or urgency on your part.

It's not a problem for me personally since I can just grab the 0.91 branch from Git, but a lot of people who can't are losing Bitcoins because there aren't any good usable cold storage solutions any more.

New features are great to have, but they shouldn't delay you having a minimal viable product out, where "minimum viable product" is defined as "an application that lets you send and receive bitcoins from cold storage without consuming obscene amounts of RAM and also doesn't crash every few seconds."

I was not aware that 0.90 was "unusably crash-prone".  If that was the case, I would not have delayed the 0.91-beta release.  What platforms/contexts are unusably crash-prone (besides Mac)?  As far as I can tell, Windows and Ubuntu seem to be working well for most.

[cp1]

0.90 works fine for me on linux.

[Rock6.3]

Sorry in advance for being blunt, but when it comes to releasing 0.91 you guys really need to shit or get off the pot.

Right now you don't have any viable downloads on your website. The 0.8x series is too resource-intensive for most users, and 0.90 is unusably crash-prone.

A year ago, I could point people in this situation: http://www.fr33aid.com/1511/fr33-aid-bitcoins-stolen/ at your website and know they'd find something there they could download and use, but that hasn't been true for the last six months and I don't see any particular acknowledgment of this or urgency on your part.

It's not a problem for me personally since I can just grab the 0.91 branch from Git, but a lot of people who can't are losing Bitcoins because there aren't any good usable cold storage solutions any more.

New features are great to have, but they shouldn't delay you having a minimal viable product out, where "minimum viable product" is defined as "an application that lets you send and receive bitcoins from cold storage without consuming obscene amounts of RAM and also doesn't crash every few seconds."

I was not aware that 0.90 was "unusably crash-prone".  If that was the case, I would not have delayed the 0.91-beta release.  What platforms/contexts are unusably crash-prone (besides Mac)?  As far as I can tell, Windows and Ubuntu seem to be working well for most.

I think the answer to your question is this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=513817.0

My Win7 version of Armory has not run successfully in over a week and zero response to support emails.

[justusranvier]

I know 0.90 never worked for me on Linux, I'd have frequent problems like the UI hanging indefinitely when trying to construct an outgoing transaction with more than one output. Also, it always did a full db reindex on startup even after clean shutdowns (which were rare because most shutdowns were inadvertent from crashes). I'm pretty sure I've seen similar complaints in this thread and others.

The 0.91 branch worked for me, so I've just been using that ever since and haven't been paying attention that much to your release schedule. What changed is in the last few weeks there has been a series of sophisticated, targeted attacks on Bitcoin companies and organizations. The attacks have been distressingly successful.

Getting usable cold storage out and in use is extremely important right now.

[CryptKeeper]

0.90-beta on Windows 7 64bit together with bitcoin wallet 0.8.6, no problems so far!

[etotheipi]

I'm not saying that no one has problems with Armory.  But we got 25,000 downloads each of the last two months, and we get only a handful of support requests each day.  Unfortunately, it's still too much, as we need to focus on developing and we're not a customer support house, but we're doing our best to balance everything.

In that particular thread that is linked, we have a problem with certain types of transactions that is affecting at least 2 of the 3 users there reporting issues (which are in this thread).  I suspect this pattern is present across a lot of support requests.   I whole-heartedly agree that we need to get the app working for those users, but they still represent a small portion of our userbase -- those that are participating in pooled mining.  In fact, my neighbor who knows nothing about Bitcoin was able to get Armory running and using it, though she said it took 58 hours to sync.

0.91 is an improvement over 0.90 for sure.  But we don't believe that it's a critical upgrade.

[Rock6.3]

I'm not saying that no one has problems with Armory.  But we got 25,000 downloads each of the last two months, and we get only a handful of support requests each day.  Unfortunately, it's still too much, as we need to focus on developing and we're not a customer support house, but we're doing our best to balance everything.

In that particular thread that is linked, we have a problem with certain types of transactions that is affecting at least 2 of the 3 users there reporting issues (which are in this thread).  I suspect this pattern is present across a lot of support requests.   I whole-heartedly agree that we need to get the app working for those users, but they still represent a small portion of our userbase -- those that are participating in pooled mining.  In fact, my neighbor who knows nothing about Bitcoin was able to get Armory running and using it, though she said it took 58 hours to sync.

0.91 is an improvement over 0.90 for sure.  But we don't believe that it's a critical upgrade.

A note on your download page informing me that the product is not suitable for those doing pooled mining would have saved both of us a lot of headaches.

What is the best short term solution for us 'pooled miners' who have coins in Armory wallets that wont run?

[etotheipi]

I'm not saying that no one has problems with Armory.  But we got 25,000 downloads each of the last two months, and we get only a handful of support requests each day.  Unfortunately, it's still too much, as we need to focus on developing and we're not a customer support house, but we're doing our best to balance everything.

In that particular thread that is linked, we have a problem with certain types of transactions that is affecting at least 2 of the 3 users there reporting issues (which are in this thread).  I suspect this pattern is present across a lot of support requests.   I whole-heartedly agree that we need to get the app working for those users, but they still represent a small portion of our userbase -- those that are participating in pooled mining.  In fact, my neighbor who knows nothing about Bitcoin was able to get Armory running and using it, though she said it took 58 hours to sync.

0.91 is an improvement over 0.90 for sure.  But we don't believe that it's a critical upgrade.

A note on your download page informing me that the product is not suitable for those doing pooled mining would have saved both of us a lot of headaches.

What is the best short term solution for us 'pooled miners' who have coins in Armory wallets that wont run?

Agreed.  We were not aware of the scope of the issue until now.  Most users don't want to send their wallets for privacy reasons, and we are left to speculate on why these issues are happening.  Luckily, we have isolated it now, and can act accordingly.

Waiting for Zoella to report back on the disablecomments branch.  If his wallet works with the mod, we can add that as a command-line flag until we have fixed the core issue.

[Zoella]

Armory reporting 9 minutes left to scan. Crossing my fingers!!! Will update soon.

[kentt]

Sorry in advance for being blunt, but when it comes to releasing 0.91 you guys really need to shit or get off the pot.

Right now you don't have any viable downloads on your website. The 0.8x series is too resource-intensive for most users, and 0.90 is unusably crash-prone.

A year ago, I could point people in this situation: http://www.fr33aid.com/1511/fr33-aid-bitcoins-stolen/ at your website and know they'd find something there they could download and use, but that hasn't been true for the last six months and I don't see any particular acknowledgment of this or urgency on your part.

It's not a problem for me personally since I can just grab the 0.91 branch from Git, but a lot of people who can't are losing Bitcoins because there aren't any good usable cold storage solutions any more.

New features are great to have, but they shouldn't delay you having a minimal viable product out, where "minimum viable product" is defined as "an application that lets you send and receive bitcoins from cold storage without consuming obscene amounts of RAM and also doesn't crash every few seconds."

I was not aware that 0.90 was "unusably crash-prone".  If that was the case, I would not have delayed the 0.91-beta release.  What platforms/contexts are unusably crash-prone (besides Mac)?  As far as I can tell, Windows and Ubuntu seem to be working well for most.

I have to agree with the description that it's "unusaby crash-prone".  I tried my offline wallet on 4 different computers, 2 of which were fresh installs just for testing (one Ubuntu, one Win 7).  None of the computers could run Armory 0.9 for more than an hour with my watch only wallet without crashing.  I figured it had something to do with the number of transaction in the WO wallet and made a new offline and WO wallet.  After about a week I had the same issues though less sever.  I've come to the shitty solution of only adding to my cold storage very occasionally since each transaction decrease the amount of time it takes for Armory to crash.

I know from other threads that you're a bit frustrated with the average user who's complaining to you, but I think justusranvier is exactly correct and I think you need to take these complaints more seriously.  

[kentt]

I'm not saying that no one has problems with Armory.  But we got 25,000 downloads each of the last two months, and we get only a handful of support requests each day.  Unfortunately, it's still too much, as we need to focus on developing and we're not a customer support house, but we're doing our best to balance everything.

In that particular thread that is linked, we have a problem with certain types of transactions that is affecting at least 2 of the 3 users there reporting issues (which are in this thread).  I suspect this pattern is present across a lot of support requests.   I whole-heartedly agree that we need to get the app working for those users, but they still represent a small portion of our userbase -- those that are participating in pooled mining.  In fact, my neighbor who knows nothing about Bitcoin was able to get Armory running and using it, though she said it took 58 hours to sync.

0.91 is an improvement over 0.90 for sure.  But we don't believe that it's a critical upgrade.

A note on your download page informing me that the product is not suitable for those doing pooled mining would have saved both of us a lot of headaches.

What is the best short term solution for us 'pooled miners' who have coins in Armory wallets that wont run?

The work around for me was to
1. Rescue my BTC by getting the private keys into another wallet (-qt client perhaps since you probably have it synched up).
2. Not sending pooled funds into Armory.  I send them every once in a while when it's as much as feel comfortable leaving in a web wallet.

Note that this hasn't stopped Armory from crashing but it make it stable enough to start and run long enough to do a transaction.

[kentt]

In that particular thread that is linked, we have a problem with certain types of transactions that is affecting at least 2 of the 3 users there reporting issues (which are in this thread).  I suspect this pattern is present across a lot of support requests.   I whole-heartedly agree that we need to get the app working for those users, but they still represent a small portion of our userbase -- those that are participating in pooled mining. 

It's not the userbase the participates in certain types of pooled mining that is the issue.  The issue is that Armory won't work for some typical transactions (one input, lots of output addresses).  There are many applications of this and it will only be more common.
Sorry for being so adversarial today. I like what you guys are doing.

[Zoella]

Armory reporting 9 minutes left to scan. Crossing my fingers!!! Will update soon.

No love with 3-beta.

Trying to see if the disable comments fix will resolve the sweep issue now. Will report back in about 45 minutes or so.

[Zoella]

<snip>
2. Not sending pooled funds into Armory.  I send them every once in a while when it's as much as feel comfortable leaving in a web wallet.
<snip>

Unfortunately this won't work on many switching pools. Middlecoin and WafflePool both payout on a daily basis. You can't hold it. These are the two primary pools that I believe are killing my wallets.

[etotheipi]

Armory reporting 9 minutes left to scan. Crossing my fingers!!! Will update soon.

No love with 3-beta.

Trying to see if the disable comments fix will resolve the sweep issue now. Will report back in about 45 minutes or so.

So there may be no short-term solution for 0.91-beta for these types of wallets.  We will move forward with 0.91 as-is, and plan to get a wallet with lots of these transactions and fix this issue in a point-release, 0.91.1.

[Zoella]

Armory reporting 9 minutes left to scan. Crossing my fingers!!! Will update soon.

No love with 3-beta.

Trying to see if the disable comments fix will resolve the sweep issue now. Will report back in about 45 minutes or so.

So there may be no short-term solution for 0.91-beta for these types of wallets.  We will move forward with 0.91 as-is, and plan to get a wallet with lots of these transactions and fix this issue in a point-release, 0.91.1.

Personally I think the bootstrap is a significant enough upgrade to warrant a release. Great feature. I'll have an update on the sweep operation in a little bit. I really hope this works so that I can empty the wallet and send it to you for testing. If not, I'll send you a watching only version.

[justusranvier]

0.91 is an improvement over 0.90 for sure.  But we don't believe that it's a critical upgrade.

I'm eating lunch with altoz right now and he also says he's had problems with 0.90 that required him to delete the .armory directory.

I think you've got a lot of users who having problem but are just living with them instead of reporting them.