Hardware

Storage Device

BS uses memory-mapped files to achieve high performance disk I/O. This works with a hard disk drive (HDD) but is optimized for a solid state drive (SSD), which is highly recommended.

Storage Space

As of March 2017 the mainnet blockchain requires 115 GB of disk space and full address indexing in the server requires an additional 125 GB.

Space must must also be allowed for expansion while running, based on the configuration setting file_growth_rate. The configured growth rate can be reduced as the files get larger. So for example a fully indexed store of 240 GB configured with a 4% growth rate would require 250 GB. The store should not be allowed to hit the space limit as an expansion attempt will cause process termination with store corruption.

Log files require additional storage space. Growth can be rapid with verbose logging enabled. Logs should be stored on an SSD and may be rotated to other storage after reaching a configured size.

Memory

A significant amount of testing has been performed at 8 GB RAM on all supported operating systems, with good results. Best performance is achieved with RAM sufficient to store the entire database, as paging costs approach zero. At 8 GB RAM configuring database.cache_capacity = 10000 is recommended. At 128 GB RAM or more a cache capacity of zero is optimal.

File Handles

We have encountered failures on some Linux and OSX platforms due to default or configured limitations on file handles. If this is encountered the problem can generally be resolved by increasing the operating system limit. Improvements in v3.1 and v3.2 have resolved this issue.

Processors

A significant amount of testing has been performed with 4 cores on all supported operating systems, with good results. The node is designed to fully utilize all cores to the extent possible. The number of cores can have a significant impact on block and transaction validation performance. Excellent performance is achieved with 16 cores, while best performance is typically achieved in the neighborhood of 32 cores, although with certain blocks we have seen 64 cores fully utilized.

Bandwidth

With a high end machine bandwidth will become the limiting factor in performance of initial block download. A gigabit connection should be able to download the blockchain in 15 minutes once parallel initial block download is enabled.