PoA private net keeps mining blocks at high rate with no transactions

Question

I am creating a private network based on Clique (PoA) and I have a certain problem with the amount of blocks mined by my two nodes. The number of blocks is very high I quickly reached hundreds of blocks even if there is no transactions being sent throughout the network.

I know this is probably due to specifying BlockTime to 1 in the genesis file, but can't we stop the mining if no transactions are present ?

having a million empty block is not appropriate.

Answer 1

Set BlockTime to 0. With that, mining will be done only when needed. For example :

  "clique": {
    "period": 0,
    "epoch": 30000
  }

PR that enabled this behavior :

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/15323

For 0-period clique miners, commit new mining work whenever a transaction arrives