Topic: [CHALLENGE] Run A Bitcoin Node: 14 Days To 14 Merits - page 90. (Read 19213 times)

I'm in! I started about 4 hours ago and this is my progress. The time left is showing just 3 days but it’s not always so, sometimes it reset and goes back to an average of 12 days or so.


These are my settings. I set pruning to 20GB (I think it should be more because my external ssd drive which I am using has over 500GB of space).

It's an older 128 GB disk, with 70 TBW. It's not something I worry about now, since that disk has served me for many years and still has enough left, but I was surprised that just 1 blockchain download will now take 10-20% of it's "life". It has written another 0.3 TB since my previous post.

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Another experiment:
I'll keep hourly status-snapshots again.

I'm running this on a 6-core Xeon (E-2236) with 32 GB RAM and 1 GBit internet (and HDD, but I won't be using that).
I expect this one not to slow down when chainstate grows, because it won't be low on memory (and even though dbcache isn't that high, that doesn't matter when using a RAM-drive for storage).

Which SSD do you use and what is its TBW?

Now that you made me curious about the wear of my own SSD in my Umbrel node (mine is a Samsung SSD 860 Evo 1TB), I checked S.M.A.R.T. attributes:

This SSD has endured two full intial blockchain downloads and 24/7 operation as Umbrel node for about two years now. Total Power_On_Hours indicates almost three years of use but the first year of life was not as storage device for a Bitcoin node.

Attribute ID# 177 Wear_Leveling_Count is to be read as remaining percentage of endurance. So after something over a total of 94TiBW (1TiB is 2⁴⁰ bytes) my SSD is at 87% of remaining endurance. I'm not worried at all now. I was a bit worried when I read LoyceV's post.

I hope this is not off-topic here.

DAY 4 progress:

Update: with 5.6 GB chainstate, progress (and bandwidth consumption) is going down. Disk reads are increasing while CPU-consumption is decreasing.
I checked something else: writing 20-50 MB/s for a few days is very destructive for an SSD! Until now, I've written 2.6 TB in less than a day, which is already more than 10% of all writes that SSD has seen in it's entire life! My current estimate for this old disk is that this is going to cost 10-20% of the SSD's TBW (TeraBytes Written, a design-life span for SSDs). This is destructive for old SSDs with little RAM!

Some months ago I had some issues with my Raspi Umbrel node which I run for testing purposes only, not a big fan of Umbrel, (1TB SATA SSD, Raspi 4B with 8GB RAM) and I decided to throw away any Umbrel app (i.e. delete Bitcoin, Electrs, Lightning node containers on it). I didn't want to setup Umbrel completely from scratch though, because I also wanted to test how fast a (and in particular my) Raspi can perform the initial blockchain download (IBD) under slightly optimized conditions.

After deleting all Umbrel containers I made sure the blockchain files were truely gone. Then I re-installed the Umbrel Bitcoin Core container, opted for ~4.5GB of dbcache size, according to debug.log Umbrel passed dbcache=4883 to bitcoind.


My Umbrel is configured to only communicate via Tor outside of my local network. My internet connection has stable 100MBit/s for download and 40MBit/s upload bandwidth. My Raspi isn't overclocked but it is actively cooled with a fan which keeps it under 40°C even at higher workloads.

I will list the timestamps of UpdateTip log entries at intervals of 50k blocks as processed by my Raspi Umbrel below:

If there's interest, I can also post UpdateTip logs at some constant time elapsed intervals, maybe every 6h would be convenient?

As you can see the IBD to current tip at block height 796033 on 2023-06-26T16:46:31Z (received time, not blocktime) took little less than 95 hours in total on such "weak" hardware like a Raspi 4B with 8GB RAM and 1TB SATA SSD, UASP active for USB3-SATA-adapter.

Day 3

Oh wow, I felt it would require a higher specification system. My system is actually higher than yours, it’s a gaming system from barely a few years back so I believe if you can do it with this specifications then I can too. The difference is just the internet speed. I’ll just start today anyways and just see how it goes.

Day 4:
Almost 37%, 5 years and 21 weeks behind.

That's okay, I'm doing it because I was curious
I'm currently at 2020-12-31 (63.38% progress). CPU-usage is around 40%, memory-usage at 23%, chainstate is 5.0 GB and bandwidth continuously varies between 0 and 100%.
System load is 2.6. iostat -dx /dev/sda 5 shows disk %util around 60%, and iotop shows reading 1-3 MB/s, and writing 20-50 MB/s. Memory usage of bitcoind is 12.0%.
I'm not sure what's the current bottleneck, nothing seems to be maxed out. I think most of the idsk writes are updating chainstate. That makes it tempting to do the same on a ram drive.

Of course, this contest is open perpetually so you can join at any time.

Hey guys, can I still join? Would install it on a PI or NAS.

Happy to be part of the community ☺️

FWIW i've seen few ISP has relative slow speed, but remains fast when you perform test with speedtest.net or similar website . Sometimes i'd just download stuff (such as video from youtube using yt-dlp) for less biased result.

Progress:



You can join, but you won't get any merit for it obviously  

Screw it, I'm doing it

My setup:
Bitcoin Core 26.0 on Ubuntu Linux 20 LTS, with settings:

Every hour I store the output of:

My system:
Intel i3 laptop with 8 GB RAM, no swap, SSD, VPN and about 70 Mbit/s fibre (shared with the rest of the house).

I haven't tried this with 8 GB RAM since the Ordinal spam largely increased chainstate. If this doesn't lead to surprises, I expect it to be done on Monday. If it does lead to surprises, I'll try the same with 16 GB RAM.

Day 3:
Forgot to keep my computer turned on overnight, still making progress though.

DAY 4 progress:

Note: Ignore the per hour. It's usually slow at this time (evening).

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Disk is fine. It's normally below 50%. On rare cases, sometimes it's going go 60-70% but never 100%  

Last I checked it was something like 5.6+ Mbps  

So you have upgraded your internet speed? if there are too much connections in your area it will probably slow during peak hours, the speed upgrade will be useless since your still in the same facility, specially if your box is full or loaded, but hoping that your upgrade will solve your problem.
try also to close other applications and some who runs in your background, chrome also eats alot of memory this days.

Or your disk

Try speedtest.net

My RAM usages is 45-50% on average. And the CPU would get up to 30-50% sometimes. So we can assume my internet speed sucks.  


No 1 is not the case for me, like I said above. I actually did tried that turning on & off. And it works but for a short amount of time.

A moment ago it was 0.07% per hour. Restarted the bitcoin core and now it's 3.00% per hour (eventually it will go down).

Miracle miracle miracle...

P.S: Contacted my isp, said they'll increase my speed but will have to wait a couple of days, as my current internet package still has some days left.