On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 11:00:27PM -0700, Eric Voskuil wrote:
> I've recently merged a change to libbitcoin-node which cleans up
> logging. There are a few misleading log messages pertaining to blocks.
> There are actually no errors and the behavior I see is normal, so I've
> changed the descriptions and locations of the messages so they are more
> obvious and appropriate. The only actual errors I ever see pertain to
> connection failures, but nothing that appears unusual.

I need to look into your recent updates, as I've been mucking with the
networking lately and am finally at the point where I can sync testnet
with an updated protocol version. Haven't tested mainnet yet, but I
will after some cleanups.

> I think at this point that stall is due to not getting a necessary
> block, and the memory consumption results from accumulating subsequent
> blocks into the orphan pool. Sometimes this is steep and other times
> minimal. When the block is obtained the stall clears, but high memory
> consumption can severely degrade performance and the process can get
> killed before the stall clears. I'm going to add some instrumentation
> now so I can monitor the orphan pool and block requests.

The stalls are still a factor, so we can safely separate them from a
protocol issue. The currently isolated repeatable stall I can get (on
my working tree) is when a block is failing to be accepted for some
reason and it doesn't seem to clear until something drastic happens
(i.e. at least a rebuild/restart) rather than just waiting and
waiting. Still haven't narrowed it down any further, but I suspect
it'll turn up at some point now that we're looking for it.

-Neill.