Bitcoind becomes non-responsive over JSON-RPC, have to manually restart all the time

I run bitcoind on AWS on Ubuntu. The machine has 4Gb of memory and free shows some of it remains free. Enough disk space too.

Yet, I have to manually restart bitcoind quite often, because sending JSON-RPC requests returns a timeout error. That is, at first they do work, but then they don't. No matter what kind of request.

Has anyone ever come across this? Why does it happen? Does anybody have a plausible theory?

snitko

Posted 2015-02-20T11:35:42.663

Reputation: 163

What version of bitcoind are you running? Also, is the blockchain caught up? (You can tell what block you're on by running bitcoind getinfo or bitcoin-cli getinfo respectively) – JohnDvorak – 2015-02-20T14:27:24.290

Does increasing rpcthreads cause the problem to stop? – Nick ODell – 2015-02-20T21:21:38.380

Some HTTP client software does not deal with the persistent connection feature that bitcoind offer. Persistant connections are off by default in 0.10 again, but can be re-enabled with -rpckeepalive. – Pieter Wuille – 2015-02-20T22:16:04.963

Answers

Upgrade to the very latest stable version. We saw alot less memory leakage with .10 on ubuntu
run a cron job to restart it every night around 4:00 am est when there are fewest ransactions. This will cut down on memory leakage
make sure your box has at least 4 gigs of ram and a 2 gig swap partition.
give us some more info here. like linux distro, machine stats and what kind of rpc calls u often do.

SethThomasRoth

Posted 2015-02-20T11:35:42.663

Reputation: 21

I have observed that if the HTTP client sending the JSON-RPC request does not send a Connection: close header then the bitcoind RPC server stops responding after a number of calls.

ademar

Posted 2015-02-20T11:35:42.663

Reputation: 103

Indeed, there seem to be some problems with certain clients and persistent connections. 0.10 disables persistent connections by default. – Pieter Wuille – 2015-04-08T18:57:14.490