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What are the minimum systems requirements for running a Bitcoin Core full node on testnet?
System requirements for running a Bitcoin Core node on testnet
Answers
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According to https://tbtc.bitaps.com/ today it's ~20GB. The RAM usage is similar to that of running a Bitcoin node on the main net.
Nice. Thank you. I just need to figure out how much RAM it consumes then :) – Thorkil Værge – 2019-06-07T14:41:40.313
1A testnet node will use about the same amount of memory as a full node. There are various configuration parameters to reduce the memory usage, at the cost of some performance. – Nate Eldredge – 2019-06-07T16:53:39.440
@NateEldredge: But there are significantly fewer transactions on the testnet. Does the RAM usage not scale with the number of transactions? – Thorkil Værge – 2019-06-07T18:05:44.073
1@ThorkilVærge: AFAIK, no, it doesn't. A major part of the memory usage in Bitcoin Core is caching previous transactions, so that they can be used to verify future transactions that spend their outputs. The cache size is set statically, and I believe the default is the same for both mainnet and testnet. So on testnet, you'll use the same amount of memory, but your cache will hold transactions going back further in time. This does mean, though, that you should be able to lower the cache sizes for testnet in your config file without a significant performance hit. – Nate Eldredge – 2019-06-07T18:28:02.170
I ran both instances on a machine and compared their RAM usage using htop. The test net and main net use an equivalent amount of RAM, within 30 % of each other. – Thorkil Værge – 2019-06-07T20:43:21.633