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Running Bitcoin 0.11 on Raspberry Pi 2 (Quad core 900MHz 1GB RAM, 128GB Flash Drive for blockchain, 8GB SD Card for OS and software).

Blockchain is fully synced, 13 connections. In htop, I see I'm around 700/862MB RAM, 1/99MB Swap. 1 processor is up around 90% but the other 3 are down in the <5% range.

I SSH into the pi (running bitcoind, no GUI) and some commands take forever to get a response. Sometimes getinfo or getpeerinfo will take 30-60 seconds to print out. gettxoutsetinfo takes way longer: almost ten minutes!! I don't see any resources being maxed out in htop during this time.

I know this is a low-power machine, maybe the UTXO set hash in the gettxoutsetingo command is what's specifically taking so long in that case.

Can I adjust any settings either in the RPi OS or bitcoin.conf to get snappier performance? Ideally I would like to run a few python scripts that use RPC, triggered by bitcoin's blocknotify=...

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  • I'm guessing it is hardware, however gettxoutsetinfo is supposed to take a while. I switched my node over to a spare PC (3ghz 4gb ram)as my node, it responds much quicker to the getinfo getmininginfo and other RPC calls, less than 1 second.
    – m1xolyd1an
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 5:07
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    1 GB of RAM seems low for bitcoind, and 99 MB of swap doesn't help much. top should show a state for the bitcoind process. If it's in state R most of the time, then CPU is probably the bottleneck. If state D, then it may be I/O (including swapping / paging).
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 7:17
  • There's about 15 "bitcoind" threads and most are in state S. One is in state D.
    – pinhead
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 7:21
  • I can't contribute much to the resolution of that problem, except stating that I have the exact same (with RPi 2 running Raspbian Jessie, headless). In my case bitcoin-cli gettxoutsetinfo doesn't even return anything but an empty dict. I guess it times out or something, but it does this at highly varying intervals, sometimes after 5 minutes, in one extreme case after almost 40 minutes.
    – user30582
    Commented Jan 16, 2016 at 12:31
  • I filed a ticket on github/bitcoin and got 1 reaction saying that on a RPi 2 average response time was around 7 minutes. With results! Not an empty dict like I'm getting. The difference is that my Bitcoind is compiled with the --disable-wallet option. Are you running a wallet on your Bitcoin install?
    – user30582
    Commented Jan 16, 2016 at 12:31

1 Answer 1

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I have the same set up and getinfo for me takes about 10-20s initially but then takes ~5s there after. (I need to restart the daemon periodically as it crashes for some reason). I'm running 0.11.1 and haven't made any special tweaks. gettxoutsetinfo takes around 12 minutes. CPU, RAM and Swap comparable with what you have as well.

Hardware is probably the most obvious limitation. You could overclock the Pi CPU but I doubt it will drastically reduce the response time though.

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  • I've had the same problem with crashes when using version 0.11.x. I recommend updating to v0.13.x and daemon won't crash anymore.
    – grajsek
    Commented Feb 13, 2017 at 8:57

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