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I have 1GB of memory to work with on my VPS.

I want to run bitcoind as well as a few other crypto currency daemons.

As it stands, number of connections seem to be the only value I can change that has any impact on my memory usage.

I have bitcoind set to 10 connections at the moment and it is consuming a steady 400MB of memory during this time.

What are the consequences of lowering the number of connections to say 2 or 1?

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  • Did your daemon already download the complete block chain? It's possible that block chain downloading is taking up bandwidth, but as soon as you are fully synced, the bandwidth use could be much lower.
    – Steven Roose
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 9:26
  • Are you accepting incoming transactions? (If so, STOP your bitcoind now!).
    – Stephen Gornick
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 9:52
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    @StephenGornick why should I STOP my bitcoind if I am accepting incoming connections? Did you mean to make this comment on my question?
    – user3145
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 16:18
  • 2
    How can having more connections open significantly increase the RAM memory used?
    – Steven Roose
    Commented May 8, 2013 at 17:50
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    @user3145 Absolutely yes, stop accepting incoming connections if you are a merchant and recognize payments on 0/unconfirmed transaction status. It has been proven that doing that makes you vulnerable to double spending against you somewhere around 100% of the time, roughly speaking. If you instead are a merchant that waits for six confirmations then you are fine accepting incoming transactions.
    – Stephen Gornick
    Commented May 10, 2013 at 9:23

2 Answers 2

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In theory, only one reliable connection to a trustworthy node is sufficient. If you do decide to limit your connections only to 2 outgoing ones, make sure to connect to nodes you trust to be up to date, to reduce the chance of falling behind, or worse, being the target of an attack.

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Lowering the number of connections would probably make your connection to the network less reliable. It might also make it so that any transactions you broadcast would be slower to propagate through the network, since they aren't being spread as widely as quickly.

Having only a few connections would, at the very least, make it take longer for your blockchain to get caught up, and for new blocks to be downloaded.

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  • 2
    Actually, transaction you create are only broadcast to one peer, to enhance anonymity.
    – Nick ODell
    Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 17:05

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