From: grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail•com>
To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Scaling at the end user level
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 02:21:51 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAD2Ti29UvdVevKvccbA6PbUMcmrgM4LDnL+cxVSaU4Zt3P-mJw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAD2Ti2_vGc+SJX_+uTz4ZVk1r5DhCOm6n3yKW16o9QaPKTQkHQ@mail.gmail.com>
> I never did track down this exact issue but it's an artificial
> slowdown.. meaning compression and whatever else wouldn't help much.
I meant for anyone who wanted to distribute the dataset as a project.
> It has something to do with the database file locking and flushing..
> on some systems I've seen the block chain get fully done in 10-20
> mins and on others it slows down to the point where it will never
> catch up.. but not in a way that's related to the age of the computer
> or anything. You might want to experiment if you want to track this
> down.. try building your own libs
Rather than use dated/modified packages, I compiled current versions
of all component sources manually.
> and compare different operating
> systems, on the same hardware to get a more 'true' comparison maybe.
True. Used them all before, happy with BSD for now. Just knowing
what the general setup is on those zippy systems should suffice.
ie: blindly fishing for such a zippy system to compare through various
install tests doesn't sound too appealing. It's different than benchmarking.
Datapoint: The system below is not zippy.
> I think everyone is vaguely aware of the problem but it has not
> been tracked down and eliminated. I don't think the problem is
> within bitcoin itself but in how truthfully the database file is
> actually written to disk.
Am I correct in guessing that, given a certain height, the data
in blkindex and blk0001 should be the same across instances?
# file blk*
blk0001.dat: data
blkindex.dat: Berkeley DB (Btree, version 9, native byte-order)
Pursuant to comparison, what is the format of blk0001.dat?
> If it really gets flushed to disk every
> block like bitcoin wants it to be, then there is no way that you
> could get more than 50-60 blocks per second through it (due to
> rotational latency), but on some operating systems and versions/options
> it seems to end up caching the writes and flies through it at
> thousands of blocks per second. The problem is similar to what's
> mentioned here: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19
I'm not running Linux with asynchronous data and metadata
turned on by default if that's what you mean :) ZFS, disk crypto,
standard drive write cache. Looking at it, I'm largely buried in
that crypto at 8MB/sec or so.
> Perhaps it's as simple as some default in the db lib.. and it seems
> to default to different things on different version/operating
> systems/filesystems.
Hmm, I compiled everything with the defaults. Will go back and
look at bdb options. I don't think there was anything interesting
there. I'd bet a lot is tied to the fs and cpu.
Single core p4@1•8 512k/2g isn't much up against ZFS+disk crypto.
It seems to take its time and roll up all but the last database file (of
a hundred or more) on receiving sigterm. Is it supposed to roll
and delete the last log too? Can I safely delete everything but
the blk* files? (wallet excepted of course :)
Currently, in KiB...
running:
853716 database
747881 blk0001.dat
290601 blkindex.dat
4361 addr.dat
137 __db.005
137 __db.004
137 __db.003
137 __db.002
41 __db.006
25 __db.001
sigterm:
750569 blk0001.dat
291497 blkindex.dat
8465 database/log.0000000nnn
4361 addr.dat
database/log.0000000133: Berkeley DB (Log, version 16, native byte-order)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-02-08 7:22 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-02-08 5:18 grarpamp
2012-02-08 7:21 ` grarpamp [this message]
2012-02-08 8:34 ` Wladimir
2012-02-08 19:32 ` grarpamp
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