We’re about 33 hours into this. Ubuntu, seems to be taking the lead at 51%. StartOS is now about the 36% point. Bitcoin on Umbrel appears to have crashed, so it’s likely going to be behind.
Day 6:
Bitcoin Knots on Ubuntu completed, most likely, yesterday. I was out of the town for about 36 hours, and it completed some time while I was away
Bitcoin Knots on Umbrel stops unexpectedly every few hours, so it’s not making much progress. Sometimes I can just restart Bitcoin Knots, and it resumes. Other times if I restart Bitcoin the entire system stops responding, and I have to hard power cycle the server.
Bitcoin Knots on StartOS is at 65.67%, and progress is getting noticeably slower.
1 Like
This test did not go at all, as I expected. But I think we can draw some conclusions here, and close the experiment. Namely, that @Mammoth is correct, in that 4-8 GB of RAM not being enough for Bitcoin is not a general Bitcoin problem, or a UTXO set problem, but a Bitcoin on StartOS problem. Now, I did notice that the default Knots for Ubuntu setup has a setting to not verify previous to a certain block. I don’t know if that’s the case on the other implementations. This might explain one reason Knots on Ubuntu completed faster, but this does not explain why Bitcoin on StartOS comes to an absolute crawl in the last 20 - 30 percent.
I think @morelub is on to something here. Some optimization of Bitcoin on StartOS might be worth consideration. Or at least better understood, and better explained on our part. Simply assuming that the UTXO set vs the RAM, is causing an unreasonable IBD time, does not appear to be correct.
With regards to Bitcoin coming to a crawl, @ThatLinuxDude did an interesting analysis that might be related.
1 Like
Wow, thanks for that detailed experiment, and thanks for linking my thread. I will post my findins there (still ongoing).
I just happen to have also a HP Elitedesk G2 800 mini with 8GB RAM, 2TB SSD, no Wifi but ethernet. Which should make our tests very comparble, besides the RAM difference.
Do you happen to still have access to the machines filesystem? If so, the debug.log file in the bitcoin datadir would be very helpful to have (you could also see when the Ubuntu node finished syncing and get an exact timeframe for the entire sync).
Plus I’d be asking if you can remember the utilization stats of Start9 via the Webdashboard (see my thread). The kernelspace CPU utilization % is something that I found highly suspicious (70-75% of total utilization where in kernelspace while overall CPU utilization was less than 50% during IBD which points to issues with I/O or drivers).
1 Like
I’d love for StartOS give us the ability to disable network adapters that are not in use. It would help rule out all kinds of potential problems with certainty, and limiting root access means you have to give GUI methods for such basic functions IMO…