Experiences with Running a Lightning Node

This thread is self-moderated, so let's keep it focused on Lightning node experiences and implementations. Feel free to ask questions too.

I’ve had my c-lightning node up for four months now and thought I’d share some insights. Would love to hear from others about their setups, strategies, and any plugins they’re using.

So you seem to be making way more fees than I do. Most of mine are just 1 or 2 sats. Is that common for you? I’ve noticed some bursts in transactions here and there, but they always seem to stop.

I recently dropped my fees to 0 in some channels because they got really unbalanced. Normally, I keep my fees at around 15-30 ppm. Anyone else doing this?

Biggest routing payment I had was around 30k sat. Most are under 1500 tho. Just 150 failures since the start of the year. I guess it just depends on who you’re connected to.

Been running my Lightning node (LND) for quite some time but haven’t looked deep into it. Are there any tools that can help me analyze performance better? Like channel usage stats?

Totally agree it all comes down to who you connect with and the channel sizes. I’ve been told it’s good to watch your channels manually. Here’s what I’ve learned: Don’t connect to already connected nodes, and close unused channels.

Best way to check your stats is using the lncli fwdinghistory command. If you want a deeper dive, try ThunderHub or RTL. They help visualize your data better.

Oh man, I made that mistake too. Opened channels to Bitfinex and Nicehash. Was routing big payments until Bitfinex hiked their fees. Turns out they had a direct channel too.

When a channel is unbalanced, it’s smart to lower fees on that side. You can also use dynamic pricing to encourage routing. Anyone doing this?

Agree, I’ve done that. Sometimes, lowering fees worked for me after I made the channels free. It rekindled transactions. Might try circular payments to rebalance.

Is anyone adjusting their channels based on fees? If there are free routes available, it might not be worth keeping Bitcoin locked up in channels.

Interesting perspective! Seems like connecting to already connected peers might not be a bad idea after all. I’ve seen some write-ups, but it’s a lot of work for just a few sats.

Automation for fee adjustments could definitely help. If running a node is so capital-intensive, charging interest against earnings could make sense.

Here’s my setup. I’ve got 7 channels open with a decent amount of capacity but my fees are quite high. Kind of isolated in the network.

Appreciate you sharing that! I’ve fine-tuned my fees and November is looking really good for my node. Planning to open two more channels soon.

I’ve had a bunch of failed transactions lately with no clear reason. 48 failures on one day alone. Got enough liquidity, so it’s baffling.

To find out why payments failed, try the lightning-cli listforwards command. You can see detailed errors there.

I know about that command but can’t make sense of all the error descriptions. Sometimes it feels useless to even look at them.

I’m curious about whether payments were split. Seems like multiple attempts and slight value changes lead to different routing fees.