bitcoind is too heavy

[NRF]

You could upload the blockchain, but it would still have to do allot of the real CPU intensive stuff (scanning the blockchain for the keys in your wallet) but it would be a time saver.

The 612MB for ram that comes in a micro while small is more than enough to process transactions so I would not worry too much about that.

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[rupy]

Ok, phew, it works fine when the chain is downloaded... uses alot of ram though, but it's ok.

[P_Shep]

I wish it didn't depend so much on this boost crap.
I've been trying to compile it for the mipsel architecture, but I'm stopped at every turn due it using very specific (that is recent) functions , and not  being written in a terribly portable way. For example, I managed to get boost 1.35 to compile, but even though it says it uses 1.37, 1.35 is not up to date enough :/

[MatthewLM]

For example, I managed to get boost 1.35 to compile, but even though it says it uses 1.37, 1.35 is not up to date enough :/

Very silly since the minor revisions (The right most number) should be compatible with each other. Usually the right-most number reffers to performance improvements and bug fixes and not new features and compatibility breakages.

[P_Shep]

Much mangling to get the dependencies compiled, but I've got:
Boost (1.50) - after a flight
miniupnpc (1.6) - had to manually copy some h files. Neither 1.5 nor 1.7 worked at all
OpenSSL 1.0.1c - Manged to find mipsel table entries for ./Configure and edited them to my needs. Had to disable all ASM, even though mips asm exists
db-4.8.30.NC - which was actually easy!

ifaddrs.h is not in my library, trying what was mentioned here: https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=573.0
I got a va_args not defined in util.h - fixed by adding include stdarg.h (which I'm sure is not a good thing to do)
Now I have:
bitcoinrpc.cpp:116: error: reference to ‘int32_t’ is ambiguous
. . .

No idea how to fix that.

Hope you get your version up and Running Mathew. Maybe as some point I could help. Don't have the time or knowledge now.
This is really not portable at all

[tevirk]

One thing I noticed was that when I ran bitcoind with the data dir on an NFS volume, it performed horrendously - basically maxing out my CPU, even after the blockchain was caught up (which took well over a day).  Moving to local disk made an enormous difference, it now only takes a few percent of CPU.

I don't think the problem is that it does so much disk I/O that the network can't keep up; I suspect it's to do with the disk caching behaviour changing.  Data that is left in the buffer-cache when running against a local filesystem is being flushed in tiny pieces over NFS, or something like that.

From what I know of EC2, I wouldn't expect it to have that sort of problem, but you never know.

The CPU requirements are so light, my Grand Plan is to try and run bitcoind on a Raspberry Pi (when mine arrives).  There are two potential problems; handling the 64-bit integers on a 32-bit core (I assume that a 32-bit Atom is able to use SSE registers, the Pi might suffer more), and secondly, the I/O of an SD card.  But it will be interesting to find out.

[rupy]

Now it runs really fine on EC2 micro, CPU is around 0.3%... It uses 250MB RAM like it was hardcoded to do so. Even after sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3... I don't know enough about bitcoin to explain the need for 250MB of data, but I was hoping someone here could shed some light on this? What is it keeping cached and why?

[racerguy]

tried restarting bitcoind?  My bitcoin-qt is only using 149m right now.

[NRF]

Just a follow up on my suggestion of running small spot instance's, I don't think I stressed it enough above.  Make sure that your Drives and Instance are set to :-

Delete on termination:   No

I had an unfortunate incident a while back with a medium spot instance that a client setup (did not want to let me into his AWS control panel).  He set the instance to persist (good) but when he set up the drives he left the tick box that says "Delete on Terminate" ticked.

The instance went down for 15 minutes (spot price spiked to $1 or something) and it started up correctly..... with a fresh OS install.

You have been warned!

If you are unsure, fell free to drop me a line and I will try to help.