Parity Full History Node

Question

I'm trying to setup personal full node in archive mode (whole history) on server with this parameters:

• Intel i3 3.4GHz
• 8GB DDR3 1333 MHz
• 2TB HDD
• 100 Mbps / 128

I was expecting issues with HDD speed (despite HDD is quite solid) but I got that ETH node needs some random seeks - unfortunately after renting server.

But now node stopped syncing - my parity logged stopped on

2018-01-24 12:38:59 UTC Syncing #2422928 7d9a…cc9e 0 blk/s 0 tx/s 0 Mgas/s 0+ 7089 Qed #2430018 49/50 peers 12 MiB chain 11 MiB db 42 MiB queue

If I'm getting this right node is on block #2430018 - now its ~5M blocks in ETH blockchain.

I run parity with these flags:

parity --fat-db on --db-compaction hdd --base-path /home/eth_chain/ --mode active --pruning archive --tracing on --logging INFO --log-file /var/log/parity/proc.log

Disk is not full

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           788M   17M  771M   3% /run
/dev/sda2        20G  2.9G   16G  16% /
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0       21M   21M     0 100% /snap/parity/7572
/dev/loop2       84M   84M     0 100% /snap/core/3748
/dev/loop3       21M   21M     0 100% /snap/parity/7576
/dev/loop4       82M   82M     0 100% /snap/core/3887
/dev/sda3       1.8T   43G  1.7T   3% /home
/dev/sda1       487M   69M  389M  15% /boot
/dev/loop5       21M   21M     0 100% /snap/parity/7596
tmpfs           788M     0  788M   0% /run/user/0

I'd allow parity to use more of my hw - its entirely dedicated to this purpose

Have you any advice? Is running ETH full node in archive mode on HDD complete nonsense? - even in --db-compaction hdd mode? With 8GB RAM?

Answer 1

I hope you are running Parity version 1.8.6 because earlier versions wont make it on HDD!

Starting at around block 2.4 million are the so called spam blocks, see:

• Why is my node synchronization stuck/extremely slow at block 2,306,843?

Your archive node will take 3-4 days to get through these blocks between 2.4 and 2.7 million, and eventually gain some pace after that before it slows down at around 4.0 million again.

In total, I suspect the sync will take 2-3 weeks, maybe a bit faster if you have a high-end HDD. In general, I would recommend to run archive nodes on SSD, but it should be possible on HDD again with the Parity 1.8.6 release.