Issues with Bitcoin Core on Ubuntu

Hey everyone, I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and had to switch from 20.04 LTS. Bitcoin 27.1.0 keeps crashing while downloading the blockchain, which is super frustrating. I need to sleep but can't leave it running like this. Any tips to keep it alive overnight? I fell behind by 17 weeks after a database crash, and now the progress is painfully slow at just 0.02% per hour.

Could you share your debug.log? That might reveal what's going on. Did your node sync all the way to May 2024 before it shut down? Also, have you tried running./bitcoind instead of the GUI version?

Why not just continue in your last thread? It sounds like your hardware might not be handling Bitcoin Core's demands well.

I'm running bitcoin-qt on an SSD, so that's not the issue. Does bitcoind download the blockchain the same way as bitcoin-qt? Here’s the crash log I got.

You can't make any progress if you don’t have peers.

That's not entirely true. There is progress, just really slow without peers. I'm gonna give bitcoind a shot and will update if I run into issues.

Right. bitcoind gives you real-time logs in the console. I didn’t see any errors, just issues connecting to nodes. If you can’t connect, maybe set up a hidden service to solve IP problems. That worked for me before.

I noticed bitcoind seems to use less disk space than bitcoin-qt. I can see it on the disk activity light.

That just means it's doing less work.

But this doesn’t explain why bitcoin-qt crashed. Still, it’s helping a lot with the blockchain download! Appreciate it.

Maybe bitcoin-qt is lagging due to heavy script checks and that’s why your system is killing it. Check if your journal has logs related to the crash. Use 'journalctl since "date time" until "date time"' and set a wide range.

I think bitcoin-qt is having a memory issue because it buffers transactions before saving. Switching to bitcoind seems better since it saves blocks directly. Thanks for the advice!

Bitcoind crashed too after downloading 217MiB, and there’s nothing in journalctl! Guess I’ll just install an older version of Bitcoin Core.

Actually, there’s no real difference between bitcoin-qt and bitcoind. bitcoin-qt just runs bitcoind in the background with a GUI. The freezing issue with bitcoin-qt might be causing your system to kill it.

About that buffering, regarding UTXO sets; if you didn’t set a custom dbbatchsize, it writes in 16MiB batches. If your dbcache is high, you could try increasing it to dbbatchsize=1073741824 for 1GiB.

As someone mentioned earlier, check the debug.log created by Bitcoin Core. You’ll find it in the blockchain file directory. Unless you run bitcoind as a SystemD service, the logs won’t show in journalctl.

I’m curious. Each crash costs me over 200MiB. Can I set dbcachesize in bitcoind explicitly? This can’t be a hardware issue since I’ve been running Bitcoin Core since 2022. But I lost my db after a mistake, and the problem started with transactions from April 2024.

Your reasoning about hardware issues isn't solid.

Here’s my hardware setup (2 years old), just to clarify: https://www.kohaku.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=9 And my software: https://www.kohaku.fr/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=2.

I’m on Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS with a Lenovo Thinkpad T520, 8GB RAM, and an old Intel i5-2520M. Still using Bitcoin Core v26.0.0 from the official binaries, not Snap. My system runs fine for days and weeks. I only reboot for necessary updates. Last time I started Bitcoin Core was August 22nd, and it’s been running non-stop.