I have been downloading BTC core for about a week and it was running pretty smoothly until it got to about 90%+ downloaded. It is now timing out continuously and is not downloading at any real speed (5-20 kpbs) when it restarts to download. I’ve tried restarting, shutting down, as well as a system rebuild but nothing seems to work. I also checked that it wasn’t the internet connection with the device by downloading other services and they all do at normal speeds.
I built the device and it contains a 8GB RaspberryPi and a 2 TB HDD (basically all the recommended specs on your guide).
Any help would be appreciated and please let me know if you need additional info.
Keep in mind that we HIGHLY recommend AGAINST spinning disks. Our guides explicitly recommend SSDs and it is very likely that you will have problems with an HDD. I would not be surprised if this is the cause of your issue.
Other possible factors are power delivery (20w power supply is recommended), and data connection (disk to pi). HDDs in particular will also require their own power, and again, we recommend abandoning them entirely.
I made a typo, it is a SSD but is external. I’ll take a look at the power supply but never was an issue with my other node. If it were that wouldn’t all the services run into an issue and not just bitcoin core??
Bitcoin Core is one of the heavier services, especially for disk operations. Although they often work fine, the Pi is unfortunately not really built for this, which is why we are moving away from them (especially with external disks). The best experience will come from using an all-in-one style case that provides a power management board, but ultimately you will always be relying on a USB connection for all software operations, in addition to storage. This may be exacerbated by our system in some way, but we understand that most projects suffer from these i/o problems, and we are seeing a trend away from this hardware as a result.
Regarding your issue more specifically - are there any errors in the Bitcoin logs? Also where do you have your RPC Threads and Worker Queue set? You might like to raise those values to 16 and 128 and see if it helps.
Thanks, Dave. Appreciate the quick responses. Those are the values set and don’t see any errors in the logs. BC will just time out and then continue to get a few blocks before doing it again. It worked perfectly fine up until the last 10% so at this point I’ll just have to get it fully synced and see if it resolves itself.
When it times out, is this just the healthcheck reporting? Meaning, there are no issues in the logs, but the healthcheck goes yellow with the timeout message? If so, this is a known bug in our healthcheck, and nothing is actually wrong with Bitcoin. How long has it been stuck at 99.6? You may just need to wait for it to complete
Finally got synced and it seems to be staying connected. Downloading electrum server now, so I’ll follow up with you if I run into time out issues when using Sparrow with it. Thanks again for your help and good to know about the health checks.
I was running the PI with External SSD and after a couple of years I started having the same problems, out of the blue, I then started checking the SSD and noticed that it was pretty full. My thoughts were that I had some how saved backups on there. I was getting pretty fed up with the flakeyness of the Pi as it can be quite temperamental. I shut it all down and purchased a Small Form factor PC
Lenovo Mini PC Desktop Computer ThinkCentre M93p USDT Tiny Intel Core i5 240GB SSD Hard Drive 8GB. I replaced the SSD with - Crucial BX500 SATA SSD 2TB, 2.5’ Internal SSD - CT2000BX500SSD101.
I downloaded the Start9 image and followed all instructions and its up and running, but seem to be back at the same issues i was having whereby the BitcoinCore just stuck at 92% 92.04% to be exact and keeps Timing out. its been trying to Sync for almost 2 weeks. is this normal??
Take a look at Bitcoin’s logs. Is it finding new blocks? If so, it’s probably fine. The last 10% takes the longest, as the UTXO set has ballooned, and transactions in the blocks have become much more complex - harder to verify.
The only concern I have with your setup is the low RAM. 8GB will be fine for the time being, once you’ve completed the IDB, and verification. The process would be much faster if you had 16GB. But once you get past that, I think it will work fine. Upgrade the RAM when you can.
So the SSD is not fast enough for running the node at all? I have the single disc in there to run the operating system and everything else. I had read about people doing this and it all seemed fine. What I have done is stopped all other services and let core run on its own, it’s slowly slowly looking better will update when it’s complete.
----ok, so its up 2% in 24 hours since stopping all other services
All good, so I stopped everything from running except BTC Core and it seems to have taken off at 97% now, will slowly start everything else when its done, most likely by the end of the day.
once the image (follow start9 instructions, very very easy) is on the SSD and you boot it, it will beep when you start it, it will reboot and beep again and then boot in to the operating system. The Beeps are just saying … hey, you do’nt have a keyboard plugged in, and then it plays honey badger
Up and flying… After stopping everything from running but BTC Core it made a difference, I didn’t think it would. am on a 1gbps line and thought it would fly down but no such luck. Everything is now up and running and very happy with this little PC over the PI. I think its probably cheaper too, and certainly quieter!
They call it an Initial Block Download, or IBD, but that name gives the false impression that a fast internet connection will mean a fast download. But it’s not about that. They really should call it IBV - Initial Blockchain Verification. During this process, your server cryptographicly verifies every transaction that has every occurred on-chain. It’s not about download speed. It’s about processing power. Your primary bottleneck was lack of RAM.
but this device is got 8MB, is that not enough? I am noticing that LND is just constantly syncing to Graph and not telling me much more which is a pain as when it doesn’t sync completely the lightning Wallets don’t connect
