...
I watched as the bitcoind would slowly consume more and more memory, up until it took almost the entire 8G available, at which point it would invariably die off.
What was the magic you used to produce the output, (8G <-- bitcoind is using this much ram.)
Somethings not right there man.
Linux will try to use alot of the computers memory to keep the system fast. 8 gigs of ram
i'm thinking is below average for power linux users. Is adding more of it an option for you.
Maybe i'll bootstrap a build and run the latest bitcoind and the p2pool to see what the story is.
No magic at all... and honestly I'm not sure why things just kept spiraling up like they did. I had that node running for over a year and never experienced any problems with it until relatively recently. I ended up just killing the node. I couldn't justify the $80 a month expense, and I didn't have the time to constantly monitor it to ensure it was behaving. I know there are plenty of other nodes out there running on Linux, and likely not experiencing anything near what I saw, and to be honest I never bothered inspecting it too closely. I just finally got fed up with the hassle and realized that I didn't want to deal with it any longer. I still run my own local node and now use windpath's node as my backup instead of my own VPS.