bitcoind won't start; runs out of memory

[Krona Rev]

I've been running bitcoind on a VPS for a few months. A few days ago it crashed. Since then every time I restart it it runs out of memory within a minute or two. The VPS has 1GB of RAM and I'm not running anything else. Here is exactly what it says:

Code:

************************
EXCEPTION: St9bad_alloc       
std::bad_alloc       
bitcoin in AppInit()       

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc

The last time I was successfully running it I had version 0.9.1. When it wouldn't restart I upgraded to 0.9.2.1, but the same thing happens.

Can anyone help? Thanks!

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[Challisto]

I don't think 1GB is enough to run Bitcoin and an OS. Currently it's using 800MB on my machine.

[Krona Rev]

If 1GB RAM isn't enough, I'll probably just give up the VPS and stop running a node. That would be a shame.

[shorena]

I have an 2Gig machine that runs a node just fine, its on win7 and testnet though. But I cant imagine that 1 gig shouldnt be enough.

Can you check how much ram (according to the OS) was used, how many connections where open and whether or not the VM actually gave you a full gig at the time of the crash?

It might just be bad VMWare running in the background.

[oldbute]

For what it's worth I run a full node with 1GB RAM.  Dipping into swap a bit but it has never complained

Code:

@AOpen:~# bitcoind getinfo
{
    "version" : 90000,
    "protocolversion" : 70002,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 313092,
    "timeoffset" : -243,
    "connections" : 45,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 18736441558.31023788,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1386727402,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "errors" : ""
}
@AOpen:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1000        916         84          0         17        197
-/+ buffers/cache:        701        299
Swap:         1953        370       1583

[AuroraHF]

I don't think 1GB is enough to run Bitcoin and an OS. Currently it's using 800MB on my machine.

It's perfectly fine to run BitcoinD on a 1 GB VPS. What OS are you using, OP?

[gweedo]

2GB is required, and you will probably want some swap as well.

[AuroraHF]

2GB is required, and you will probably want some swap as well.

Well now that you mentioned it, my VPS had 512 MB VSwap. So yeah, OP you need to get a more robust VPS, or at least something with some VSwap.

[Krona Rev]

Thanks for the help. The VPS is running Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS. According to free -m there is no swap space, which might be causing the problem.

I don't get to the point where I can call bitcoind getinfo because bitcoind -daemon is still in the initial phase before it dies. After calling bitcoind I can use top or free -m to watch the memory usage climb until it hits 1GB and dies.

[gweedo]

You need swap, that is the problem.

[Krona Rev]

Oh well. No full node for me.

I'm curious: Does anyone know why it worked for the past 3 months, but then stopped working now? My best guess is that the main use of RAM is the utxo set. Has the number of utxo's increased recently?

[DeathAndTaxes]

It has been slowly and continually increasing pretty much forever.  There is no large and significant change to the UTXO in the last week it probably was just the straw which broke the VPS's back.

[gmaxwell]

The UTXO set is not kept in ram, just caches. Block headers are, however... and there are various overheads related to peers and such. Beyond block headers the mempool is probably one of the biggest memory users.

[ponzigo]

You have 2 options

1 - Create a swap file.
2 - Run the client using a low number of connections so it uses less ram.

Im more concerned about using in a 30 gb server... because in 2 months we will need to switch to pay the double.

[btchris]

Thanks for the help. The VPS is running Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS. According to free -m there is no swap space, which might be causing the problem.

Oh well. No full node for me.

Silly question perhaps, but have you tried adding swap space?

Code:

cat /proc/swaps
sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudoedit /etc/fstab
# Add the following one line to the end of fstab, then save & exit:
/swapfile  none  swap  sw
sudo swapon -a
cat /proc/swaps

Just be aware that this might cost you $ with some VPS providers, e.g. Amazon EC2 (although it's free with others, e.g. Digital Ocean).

[Krona Rev]

Thanks for the clarifications and suggestions everyone.

I tried running it with maxconnections=1, but this also ran out of memory.

I hadn't even considered creating a swap file on my own, so it wasn't a silly question at all.
I have root access, so I tried. My VPS provider was prepared:

Code:

fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
fallocate: /swapfile: fallocate failed: Operation not supported

Edit: I now realize I might be able to do this in other ways than fallocate. I'll keep working on it.

[Krona Rev]

I created a 1GB swapfile (using dd) and added it as swap space.

bitcoind runs again! Thanks!

[rz20]

Just for anybody that needs more than 1gb to run bitcoind.

This will create a 256mb swap file
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=256k
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

This will create a 1gb swap file
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=2048 count=512k
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

If you want multiple files change /swapfile for /swapfile2

[codegeek]

You need far more memory than that, first of all.

[Newar]

Mine runs fine on 512 memory and 512 swap.

I had to ask the VPS operator to increase the swap space as the ways I tried wouldn't work.