Author: Michael Gronager 2013-03-12 10:13:09
Published on: 2013-03-12T10:13:09+00:00
On March 12, 2013, Bitcoin nodes experienced an emergency situation, where the BDB database ran out of lock entries, causing some 0.7 nodes to get stuck at block 225430. This problem causes nodes to die with OOM failures and no bounds on memory pool size. Miners were advised to revert to 0.7 until the issue was resolved. Some suggestions were made to block or down-prioritize SatoshiDice transactions to avoid mempool exhaustion, but it appears that virtually all its traffic is coming through blockchain.info's My Wallet service. The other alternative suggested was to perform a crash hard fork as soon as possible, probably with no changes in it except a new block size limit. To address the space issue, it was suggested that mem-pool transactions be pruned based on two criteria: if they are too old (>24hr) or when the client is running out of space, then the oldest should probably be pruned. Clients keep and re-relay their own transactions; hence dropping free / old transactions would be a much better behavior than dying. Even a scheme where the client dropped all or random mempool txes would be a tolerable way of handling things. It was proposed to increase the soft and hard limit to 1 and eg 10MB, but miners should be the last to upgrade.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:47:21.488693+00:00