Hi guys I have a problem already for a few weeks.
My BTC core, Core lightning service and few other services have yellow question mark next to them in the overview.
When I open the service then most often a message under RPC is displayed: “RPC interface unreachable” or “Timed out, retrying soon”.
I have restarted the Start9 machine many times. I have tried option “System rebuild” and “Reset Tor”. But nothing is helping.
When the system is restarted the same warning is displayed. Also when the server runs for a few days it becomes unresponsive and I cannot reach it through my local URL.
My question is did anyone experience similar problems and what I could try to solve it?
The Bitcoin UTXO set is > 8GB, so it doesn’t fit in your memory, so you’re thrashing the SSD. If that drive is slow, and if that i5 is old, you exacerbate the issue.
It is an older PC. But if it is really a memory problem, how do you explain that currently memory is only used for 30%? If that is the problem i would expect its use to be much higher.
I do have a quality 2TB SSD in the PC. That should be more than enough for a while.
Let’s say you have a small paint tray that holds one litre of paint if overfilled. You have a large 2 litre can of paint. You fill the paint tray with a half a litre of paint as you can’t fit 2 litres. Why is your tray of paint half empty?
Ok so according to you we need a fat PC to run a node. Not really a sustainable situation for further decentralization of the BTC network. Btw your example with gallons and whatnot doesn’t really resonate. We use a metric system in Europe, but thanks for trying.
I would appreciate also an opinion frome someone else as well. Preferably from someone feom the Start9 team to confirm this.
Because there is a whole army of noderunners with raspberry PIs with max 8 GB RAM and much weaker CPU than mine.
I understand the frustration, but I’m not personally responsible for the bloat in the UTXO set that happened over the last 6 months.
You can continue to run Bitcoin on this device, it’s just that StartOS shows you when it’s struggling with health checks, whereas another OS wouldn’t. This sometimes gives others still on a RPi and on another OSs the false impression that everything is fine.
I’d invite you to go into the logs of Bitcoin Core. You’ll likely find that blocks are still coming in, despite the struggle.
This is true of the typical RPi user too. As a block is confirmed, they’d download it from peers, then they’d begin the process of validating it. To do this they need the whole sum of +8GB of prior blocks, something it can’t fit in memory. And so it starts thrashing the external SSD… slow and over USB. After perhaps a couple, or a few minutes, it’ll finally complete. This means a few minutes later that they should, any connected wallets will see the relevant transactions.
Give it a few months, or another period of “spamming the block chain” and maybe this validation will take longer than it takes to mine a block, in which case the RPi ceases to be useful at all. Whether this happens in 3 months or 1 year, it’s just a matter of time.
Again, this isn’t something I’m trolling you with, nor is it something that I’m happy with. And I’ll convert my example to 21st century measurements for your convenience.
Ok, thank you for your input. I didn’t think you were trolling me and I appreciate your replies. I just have a hard time to believe that the hardware is already becoming useless after only running for half a year (without any problems until now).
SSD is running via internal cable btw (no idea what it is, in the past it was IDE now its most probably something else, but it should be faster than USB cable).
Let’s see if @start9 has any more ideas.
Can you see blocks coming in on the logs? If yes, there’s not much wrong or that you can improve upon, other that buying another stick of RAM.
If there are litteral errors, you can download the log and email those into support@start9.com to get an opinion on. Small amounts you could post here too.
