Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Warning: many 0.7 nodes break on large number of tx/block; fork risk

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:18:10 +0100

Hello everyone,

Í've just seen many reports of 0.7 nodes getting stuck around block 225430,
due to running out of lock entries in the BDB database. 0.8 nodes do not
seem to have a problem.

In any case, if you do not have this block:

  2013-03-12 00:00:10 SetBestChain: new
best=000000000000015aab28064a4c521d6a5325ff6e251e8ca2edfdfe6cb5bf832c
 height=225439  work=853779625563004076992  tx=14269257  date=2013-03-11
23:49:08

you're likely stuck. Check debug.log and db.log (look for 'Lock table is
out of available lock entries').

If this is a widespread problem, it is an emergency. We risk having
(several) forked chains with smaller blocks, which are accepted by 0.7
nodes. Can people contact pool operators to see which fork they are on?
Blockexplorer and blockchain.info seem to be stuck as well.

Immediate solution is upgrading to 0.8, or manually setting the number of
lock objects higher in your database. I'll follow up with more concrete
instructions.

If you're unsure, please stop processing transactions.

-- 
Pieter