Quote from: aesma on July 20, 2017, 02:32:43 PM

Quote from: jbreher on July 20, 2017, 05:42:03 AM

Quote from: aesma on July 19, 2017, 02:24:53 PM

If you run a node you will now need 4 times more storage space, can you afford it ?

Among all the stupid reasons to be against bigblocks, this has got to be the stupidest.

Then why are so few people running a full node ?

There are also bandwidth consideration. I have more than 250TB of storage space at home, but limited bandwidth. My Bitcoin Core wallet has crashed for some reason (PC is extremely stable, with ECC memory) and it doesn't manage to recover. It took me weeks to download the blockchain, I'm not ready to do it again.

my bitcoin client used to crash often ... then I change my HD to SSD and it become much more stable ...
I think it is about the I/O Bottleneck gap ...

It came to my mind while reading an article at ACM

Quote

"Processing power is in fact so far ahead of disk latencies that prefetching has to work multiple blocks ahead to keep the processor supplied with data. [...] Fortunately, modern machines have sufficient spare cycles to support more computationally demanding predictors than anyone has yet proposed."Papathanasiou and Scott,10 2005

That disks are cheap and slow, while CPUs are expensive and fast, has been drilled into developers for years. Indeed, undergraduate textbooks, such as Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective,3 emphasize the consequences of hierarchical memory and the importance for novice developers to understand its impact on their programs. Perhaps less pedantically, Jeff Dean's "Numbers that everyone should know"7 emphasizes the painful latencies involved with all forms of I/O. For years, the consistent message to developers has been that good performance is guaranteed by keeping the working set of an application small enough to fit into RAM, and ideally into processor caches. If it isn't that small, we are in trouble.

Indeed, while durable storage has always been slow relative to the CPU, this "I/O gap" actually widened yearly throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.10 Processors improved at a steady pace, but the performance of mechanical drives remained unchanged, held hostage by the physics of rotational velocity and seek times. For decades, the I/O gap has been the mother of invention for a plethora of creative schemes to avoid the wasteful, processor-idling agony of blocking I/O.

Caching has always beenand still isthe most common antidote to the abysmal performance of higher-capacity, persistent storage. In current systems, caching extends across all layers: processors transparently cache the contents of RAM; operating systems cache entire disk sectors in internal buffer caches; and application-level architectures front slow, persistent back-end databases with in-memory stores such as memcached and Redis. Indeed, there is ongoing friction about where in the stack data should be cached: databases and distributed data processing systems want finer control and sometimes cache data within the user-space application. As an extreme point in the design space, RAMCloud9 explored the possibility of keeping all of a cluster's data in DRAM and making it durable via fast recovery mechanisms.

Caching is hardly the only strategy to deal with the I/O gap. Many techniques literally trade CPU time for disk performance: compression and deduplication, for example, lead to data reduction, and pay a computational price for making faster memories seem larger. Larger memories allow applications to have larger working sets without having to reach out to spinning disks. Compression of main memory was a popular strategy for the "RAM doubling" system extensions on 1990s-era desktops.12 It remains a common technique in both enterprise storage systems and big data environments, where tools such as Apache Parquet are used to reorganize and compress on-disk data in order to reduce the time spent waiting for I/O.

source:
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2874238