Running a full node is starting to be a pain

[arorts]

Man I'd love to see a new specialized computer product which sole purpose is to run a BTC node.

Trezor has hardware for wallets, mining companies have hardware to mine, there are hardware units to make paper wallets...

why not a piece of hardware designed specifically to run a full node?

Because Bitcoin needs a node to be as simple and ubiquitous as possible and be as decentralized as possible without depending on specific hardware. What would be the incentives to run a dedicated hardware node other than being a Bitcoin enthusiast?

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[xrobesx]

Not that im aware of, there are multiple websites that have all that information available freely without having to download anything.

You could also just switch to paypal and avoid all the complexity of that fussy Bitcoin stuff. Since you're apparently happy to trust oft-anonymous oft-judgement proof parties, paypal would likely be a big security upgrade too.

it doesn't seem right for a core developer to recommend paypal over bitcoin

[gmaxwell]

Not that im aware of, there are multiple websites that have all that information available freely without having to download anything.

You could also just switch to paypal and avoid all the complexity of that fussy Bitcoin stuff. Since you're apparently happy to trust oft-anonymous oft-judgement proof parties, paypal would likely be a big security upgrade too.

it doesn't seem right for a core developer to recommend paypal over bitcoin

It doesn't seem right that you're posting in the technical subforum without understanding what I was saying there.

[Atruk]

Someone downloading the blockchain shouldn't make your computer unresponsive.  If you don't have enough upstream bandwidth, it could make your internet really slow.

If you really want to run one, just use something like this:

https://vpsdime.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=41

6GB RAM
30GB SSD space
4 vCPU cores
2TB traffic
10Gbps uplink
1x IPv4
OpenVZ/Custom
$7/month

... wouldn't do the annual billing tho, since 30GB won't be enough for a year.

Another option is getting a decent refurbished desktop box with a reasonably modern processor and acceptable amount of RAM (~4GB should be fine). With that you can toss some linux or BSD on it and run bitcoind with the full transaction index and set yourself up a private electrum server.

The box will cost ~$150 to $200. For a bit more you can get a massive hard drive or an SSD to  stick in it.

What this option gives you is a way to move the heavy lifting of handling the blockchain off of the box you interact with everyday while giving you a similar privacy benefit to running a full bitcoin node on it... As long as you set up electrum on you client machines to exclusively use your private bitcoin node/electrum server. You also won't have to worry about constantly worrying about overpaying for or exhausting your storage space as you would have to on a VPS.

[Newar]

[...]
why not a piece of hardware designed specifically to run a full node?

It's already available in the form of a Raspberry Pi or an Odroid.

[xrobesx]

Not that im aware of, there are multiple websites that have all that information available freely without having to download anything.

You could also just switch to paypal and avoid all the complexity of that fussy Bitcoin stuff. Since you're apparently happy to trust oft-anonymous oft-judgement proof parties, paypal would likely be a big security upgrade too.

it doesn't seem right for a core developer to recommend paypal over bitcoin

It doesn't seem right that you're posting in the technical subforum without understanding what I was saying there.

you're right. I mean no disrespect, I was just more curious as why because I didn't understand. I just assumed Paypal to be competition to bitcoin.

[zvs]

Man I'd love to see a new specialized computer product which sole purpose is to run a BTC node.

Trezor has hardware for wallets, mining companies have hardware to mine, there are hardware units to make paper wallets...

why not a piece of hardware designed specifically to run a full node?

i have a couple, they have 64GB of RAM, and really fast CPUs

[halfawake]

Unless there's some serious reason that 20 GB of RAM is essential, then it's way overkill for a home user. Whatever gave you the impression that you'd need so much RAM?

Are you still having problems or was it just the one time?

My computer kept sounding worse and worse and from a little bit of research, it sounded like it was a dying hard drive.  So I bought a new hard drive and upgraded it today, hopefully that'll fix the problem.

Two reasons for wanting that much RAM: one is my computer started slowing down lately (I have a LOT of bookmarks) and with that much RAM I'd never have to worry about not having enough RAM for anything.  The other reason is probably obsolete now that I have a terabyte hard drive, which is basically wanting to be able to possibly run the old version of Armory that runs off RAM instead of hard drive space.  You need a LOT of RAM to do that and that requirement is only going to get bigger over time.  I was a little worried about my hard drive filling up with my old 200 GB hard drive being a little over half full, but now I'm only using about 10% of the space of my new drive so that's not really a concern any more.

It's a splurge, I admit it, but the other advantage is that 16 GB is likely to be a lot of RAM for quite a while, so even when this computer ends up dying, I could probably swap that chip into the next one to give it an instant boost in RAM.  Although I think several people in this thread have pretty much convinced me that two 8 GB chips running in parallel might well be faster than the 16 GB / 4 GB configuration that I had planned.

[almightyruler]

It's a splurge, I admit it, but the other advantage is that 16 GB is likely to be a lot of RAM for quite a while, so even when this computer ends up dying, I could probably swap that chip into the next one to give it an instant boost in RAM.  Although I think several people in this thread have pretty much convinced me that two 8 GB chips running in parallel might well be faster than the 16 GB / 4 GB configuration that I had planned.

Is the RAM DDR2 or DDR3? I ask because I recently upgraded from Windows XP to 8.1 64 bit, and I had to replace nearly every major part of my computer. The innards are only about 3 years old and worked just fine, but were purchased around the time that DDR2 and socket 775 were almost obsolete. I saved a bit then, but it means that this time around I had to buy a new mainboard, CPU, and RAM... otherwise I'd be running a modern version of Windows with only 4GB of RAM.

tl;dr adding to an obsolete system may be false economy in the long run.

[Vortex20000]

I have nodes for Bitcoin, Infinitecoin, Dogecoin, Latium, and P2Pool going in the background, consuming less than 6 GBs of RAM out of my 16 GBs.

[zvs]

I have nodes for Bitcoin, Infinitecoin, Dogecoin, Latium, and P2Pool going in the background, consuming less than 6 GBs of RAM out of my 16 GBs.

Memory usage seems to (mostly) depend on # of connections.

I have one bitcoind at 464MB with 80 connections, one at 503MB with 79 connections, one at 1665MB with 270 connections, and one at 1860MB with 349 connections. 

Before restarting on the two @ 349 and 270 connections, they had 476 & 423 respectively, w/ 2323MB and 1935MB memory used.

[gmaxwell]

What versions are your nodes based on? For current versions there should be relatively little dependency on the number of connections.

[halfawake]

Is the RAM DDR2 or DDR3? I ask because I recently upgraded from Windows XP to 8.1 64 bit, and I had to replace nearly every major part of my computer. The innards are only about 3 years old and worked just fine, but were purchased around the time that DDR2 and socket 775 were almost obsolete. I saved a bit then, but it means that this time around I had to buy a new mainboard, CPU, and RAM... otherwise I'd be running a modern version of Windows with only 4GB of RAM.

tl;dr adding to an obsolete system may be false economy in the long run.

Honestly, I don't really know.  I ran Belarc advisor and it just said DIMM0 and DIMM1, don't really feel like cracking the case to check for sure.  So, whatever was standard in 2011 when I bought this computer would be my assumption.

In any case...I think I'm starting to agree with your tl;dr.  It took a few days for the full effect to kick in, but my comp is running so much better now than it was with the old hard drive.  So I think I really did just have a failing drive.  Which is nice because a) I caught it before I lost any data and b) new hard drives are a lot cheaper than the RAM upgrade I had planned.  Now that I have a 1 TB hard drive and it's working better, the new RAM probably isn't necessary.  I was a little worried with the old drive that the blockchain, especially with O(2N) since I use Armory, would eventually fill up my old 200 GB hard drive.  But my new hard drive is big enough that my computer will likely become fully obsolete and need replacing before that happens.

[zvs]

What versions are your nodes based on? For current versions there should be relatively little dependency on the number of connections.

hmm, I'll try a more current version.  It was based on 0.9.1..

[arnuschky]

I also noticed a lag when bitcoind runs on my desktop. It's mostly IO related, and it is
noticeable when opening new programs etc. Sometimes the whole computer freezes for a while.
It's an older i5, 4 cores@3.6GHz, with 8GB ddr3 ram. Bitcoind eats about 1GB of memory,
which doesn't seem to be that much. I am on linux, btw.

But of course, this is all just a very subjective impression - no idea how to measure it.
I have the impression bitcoind is quite "bursty" in its disk access, regularly going over
60% in iotop. I've been noticing (and complaining about) this since a while, but maybe
I should sit down and try to quantify this one of these days. No idea though how to
do that, suggestions appreciated.

[Muhammed Zakir]

I also noticed a lag when bitcoind runs on my desktop. It's mostly IO related, and it is
noticeable when opening new programs etc. Sometimes the whole computer freezes for a while.
It's an older i5, 4 cores@3.6GHz, with 8GB ddr3 ram. Bitcoind eats about 1GB of memory,
which doesn't seem to be that much. I am on linux, btw.

But of course, this is all just a very subjective impression - no idea how to measure it.
I have the impression bitcoind is quite "bursty" in its disk access, regularly going over
60% in iotop. I've been noticing (and complaining about) this since a while, but maybe
I should sit down and try to quantify this one of these days. No idea though how to
do that, suggestions appreciated.

Do your motherboard support ddr3? It may work but just check it whether it works completely. My graphics card is ddr3 and my ram is ddr2 and there is some problem due to that. So just check it.

  ~~MZ~~

[Barnabe]

Isn't it possible that devs "compact" more than 1 year old transations into a simple text file.
It would be like
on 1.1.2013
12trbdk.....  has x.xxx BTC
1bvdsh...... has x.xxx BTC
etc

confirming these transactions has no interest so this would make things much quicker and reduce CPU and bandwidth usage.

[Newar]

Are the bursts whenever a block comes along?

I have good success running bitcoind with some niceness.

[FaSan]

I suspect someone started downloading the full blockchain off my full node.  Unfortunately, the effect was that my computer came to a screeching halt: moving the mouse and the pressing keys on my keyboard had absolutely no effect for several minutes.  When I regained use of my computer, I looked in the Task Manager and bitcoin-qt was using the most RAM, and a fair amount of processing power was being used as well.  I turned off bitcoin-qt and the problem went away; anecdotally, I'd say that's reason to believe that running the bitcoin-qt client was causing the problem.

So a little bit about my specs, both internet and computer: I'm using an internet connection of 25 Mbps down / 1.5 Mbps up - reasonable download speed (unfortunately I don't live in an area where gigabit internet is available), but not much on the upload front.  My computer has 5 GB of RAM, 250 GB of hard drive space, and a 3 Ghz processor speed.  The only part of my computer itself that I feel is underpowered is the RAM, I plan on eventually upgrading to 20 GB RAM, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

So here's my question: is there something about the way the bitcoin client is built that causes my computer to freeze up when people start to download the blockchain from me?  Or is this just a case of me not having enough upload bandwidth to handle someone downloading a full node from me?  I'd love to be able to support the network by running the bitcoin-qt client regularly, but this is starting to happen semi-regularly as bitcoin becomes more popular and I don't feel like my computer is THAT underpowered.

Start the client with the option "-bind=127.0.0.1". You can connect to another people for download but another people cannot connect and download from you.



FaSan

[arnuschky]

Start the client with the option "-bind=127.0.0.1". You can connect to another people for download but another people cannot connect and download from you.

Which is of course exactly what you want when setting up a node for supporting the bitcoin network...