Author: Peter Todd 2013-03-12 09:57:49
Published on: 2013-03-12T09:57:49+00:00
In an email thread on March 12, 2013, Mike Hearn expressed concern about the lack of bounds on the memory pool size in Bitcoin. He warned that if too many transactions entered the pool, nodes would start to die from OOM (Out Of Memory) failures, potentially causing a limited amount of time until nodes started dying en masse. However, he noted that this failure mode was relatively benign because the point at which any particular node would die is uncorrelated with other nodes, so it wouldn't cause a network fork.To address this issue, Peter Todd suggested implementing a "while [ true ] do ; ./bitcoind ; done" loop combined with ulimit to keep total memory usage to something sane as a temporary solution until proper mempool code with expiration could be written. Gavin Andresen had ideas for creating such code and could discuss them further.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:45:34.387970+00:00