[Ethereum] Ethereum Blockchain Size

blockchaingo-ethereumsynchronization

I synchnorized Ethereum blockchain in my AWS Ubuntu 16.04 server with 110GB Hard Disk.

The command I used is geth --syncmode=fast --cache=1024

According to bitinfocharts, the total size of Ethereum Blockchain is 103.10 GB total as of today (2017.11.26).

After synchronization is completed, I typed dh -h to find out how much disk space it consumed.

It is ONLY USED 38GB, which is 1/3 of the blockchain size!

Does anyone know why?

EDITED:

From this link, 5chdn answered that the Geth only offers database pruning on initial sync.

Is that the reason? what If i want to synchronized full blockchain node?

What command should I use to sync the full node?

Best Answer

You do have the whole blockchain, you are not missing any information. It's true initial sync is done in "fast" mode and contains pruned information that you don't need.

So everything is all good and well.

This also means that it's not a bad idea to delete the blockchain data and restart if you are low on disk storage and has been running a node for >6 months. The database will be much smaller (but again they both are full nodes).

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] geth reports nothing after allocating cache and handles

Is the geth data directory on a network share, USB key or other slowish storage medium? I saw the same issue when I moved the geth data directory from an SSD to a network share. It moved past this stage after about 5 minutes (instead of a few seconds) and eventually started syncing.

I did not see geth exit on its own as you did. To troubleshoot that you could try increasing the verbosity level:

$ geth --verbosity 6 console

[Ethereum] Geth disk and memory performance analysis

In short, when node is syncing it executes transactions, that are program code, that needs to read and write data (variables, arrays etc.), when executes. The data is stored at disk, and read\write accesses are random in general (depens of what code transactions include). As bigger blockchain, as more area to perform random reads\writes. I'm not sure, but I think make syncing slower when blockchain growing. So the first problem of syncing is IO. When I was syncing my node I had about 1.2K read and 0.15K write operations per second in average (SSD). I tryed to use HDD first, but syncing was too slow and I read that many people could not sync their nodes at all with HDD. The problem for me was that in production I have only HDD.

I've solved my problem with two steps:

I made synchronization with good hardware (big SSD, good CPU)
I copied blockchain directory to target host with HDD.
Profit

P.S. I can not say anything abot RAM beacause I have 32GB and did not monitor it. You can give more info about RAM usage by geth process and by docker.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] geth reports nothing after allocating cache and handles

[Ethereum] Geth disk and memory performance analysis

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