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I am interested in running a well-connected node, and I was wondering: is the memory footprint directly correlated to the number of connections?
And more broadly: with what RAM usage increases?
To what is bitcoind memory usage bound?
Answers
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RAM usage increases until it is slightly less than the total RAM available. This is due to the design of the operating system which intentionally keeps as little RAM free as possible, using all excess RAM as a disk cache to reduce I/O.
Is there a way to limit the usage of ram of bitcoind? It seems a x86/Debian with 1GB of ram is not enough. I'd rather have a slower node than a computer that is unusable when I start bitcoind. – Dirk Jäckel – 2014-02-25T09:41:54.630
Bitcoind needs about 650MB itself. You can't have a slower node and a more responsive system because I/O bandwidth is a system resource. Making Bitcoind use more I/O to use less RAM would make the system unresponsive due to the I/O. – David Schwartz – 2014-02-25T09:57:39.863