Topic: Running a full node is starting to be a pain - page 2. (Read 7355 times)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

The 30GB is not going to last long, but the 6GB is overkill. It runs strained on 1GB, but with 2 it never swaps, so you don't need 6.

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?

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.

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

I remember a time, not all that long ago, when the HDD light performed exactly the function very well...

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?