Hi there,
it seems something is wrong with my Bitcoin Core client during the syncing process. At around 80% - 97% while the RPC status looked fine there was the yellow sign saying “Timed out. Retrying soon.” I saw a similar question on the forum that got stuck at 99.6% so I decided to wait.
Then as I was approaching 98% - 99%, oftentimes both the RPC and Synced status turned blue with a sign “Starting…” and once in a while a message below appeared.
error: timeout on transient error: Could not connect to the server 127.0.0.1:8332 (error code 1 - “EOF reached”) Make sure the bitcoind server is running and that you are connecting to the correct RPC port.
The service log often goes through a verification process while “Starting…” sign appears and it looks as below:
2023-11-07T15:30:25+09:00 2023-11-07T06:30:25Z Verification progress: 83% 2023-11-07T15:32:52+09:00 Make sure the bitcoind server is running and that you are connecting to the correct RPC port. 2023-11-07T15:32:54+09:00 PROCESS TERMINATED BY SIGABRT
As of now, the log says that I got stuck at block height 810189 if I understood the log below correctly.
Start9 no longer recommends use of PI for Bitcoin. Even the 8gb is beginning to have trouble with IBD due to the increase in the blockchain size when ordinals. Matt Hill addresses that here “The Raspberry Pi, even the 8GB, is rapidly becoming obsolete. The UTXO set has grown tremendously over the last year and is now around 8GB in size. The Pi has very slow disk speeds over USB, which causes disk cache to build up. Once the cache nears 8GB, all operations will be sent to disk and become extremely slow. This is made worse if you are trying to run other services as well. We no longer recommend the Pi for Bitcoin under any configuration” Telegram: Contact @start9_labshardwareDIY, Hacking, & How-ToTroubleshooting
I am running Bitcoin Core / LND / electrs / Thunderhub on a RPI 4 - 8Gb on StartOS with LUKS (disk encryption) disabled and it’s been running smooth for me.
I also had the same setup with LUKS enabled and it had frequent time-outs and got out of sync.
So I suspect LUKS enabled on a Raspberry has severe impact on it’s CPU and I/O performance.
I think that encryption is disabled by default for Raspberry since StartOS 0.3.5, but you need to start fresh if you’re already running an encrypted instance.
This is correct, however with the UTXO set currently pushing 8GB, we are indeed abandoning the Pi entirely for Bitcoin operations. We do not sell or recommend these devices for a Bitcoin stack, although you may still have success with one (especially if you copy over the blockchain to avoid the IBD). Unfortunately the Pi 5 does not significantly address the existing resource limitations, so we will not be recommending it either.
Other services on StartOS, such as file storage and password management, are still great options on a Pi with an SD card.
