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Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 02:21:51 -0500
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From: grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com>
To: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Scaling at the end user level
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> 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)