Recently we have run into a problem with bitcoind crashing on us. After looking into the problem, we have found that the crashes always occur directly after our system issues a `sendmany` JSON-RPC command.
When sending out bitcoins, our system issues the following JSON-RPC commands:
settxfee 0.0005
walletpassphrase , 5
sendmany "", {"": , ... }
After the sendmany command, we occasionally see an error code: "-4", with the message: "Transaction creation failed". However, we also occasionally see a complete crash of bitcoind.
The crashes typically occur when our system is under higher load, and processing a higher volume of deposits and withdrawals. However, we can't really find any strong causation - other than the fact that it always occurs after a sendmany call.
These crashes seemed to occur after upgrading to 0.8. We are currently running 0.8.1, and are still experiencing the problem. However, it is difficult to tell if 0.8 is the culprit, or we just happened to scale to a sufficient size at around the same time we upgraded to 0.8.
We would like to help debug this issue, however, to be honest, we don't really know where to start. So, my questions are:
- Is this a known issue, or has anyone else experienced it? If so, are there any known work-arounds?
- How can we help to get to the bottom of this issue? Ideally, we'd either find what we're doing wrong to cause bitcoind to crash, or we'd help find the bug in bitcoind so it can be patched, and more resilient to whatever is causing this issue.
Thanks!