Hello to all,


I just want to state for the record and clarity that you don't need anywhere near 24GB of RAM to run v17. I run it using an old used laptop with 4GB RAM and an i3 processor (2nd generation I believe). Bitcoind, p2pool and cgminer are running on the same system. I did have to do a bit of fine tuning like running Ubuntu Server, limit the connections to bitcoind to 35, etc... but nothing much out of the ordinary. I've been running v17 for two days non-stop. I did not find any errors in the logs that can be related to the laptop running out of memory (or not that I've noticed) (i actually haven't found any real problems at all). Everything has been working as it should. My stale rate is for the moment a bit on the high side  ~15.4% but if I check the logs I see that it has been quite a lot lower a few hours ago (even lower than the stale rate of the network). In general it is close or lower than the stale rate of the network. But I'll keep an eye on it. The memory consumption by the relevant processes is for the moment as follows (this data comes from 'top'): 1) python (which is the p2pool node): 53.2%, 2) bitcoind: 29.9%, 3) cgminer: 0.2%, which totals to 83.3%. This changes a bit over time but not much. The CPU usage is at most around 70% for all three processes, but it is much more erratic than the memory consumption. It never stays for a long time at 70%.

However, my laptop runs into trouble if I use http://(MY_LOCAL_IP_ADDRESS):9332/. I've noticed that if i use this once or a few times, a few hours later my node runs into trouble. P2pool freezes and my computer is constantly busy doing stuff. Normally the freezing stops after a few minutes, but in general it starts again a bit later. I need to kill p2pool and restart it to get again working properly. Apparently when I use http://(MY_LOCAL_IP_ADDRESS):9332/, the memory consumption of P2pool slowly increases until it is over 2GB and then my laptop runs into trouble. This evolution takes up a few hours. If i don't use http://(MY_LOCAL_IP_ADDRESS):9332/ then the memory consumption of P2pool remains on a constant level. If I don't use  http://(MY_LOCAL_IP_ADDRESS):9332/, and just check the node status through the command line i don't have any problems at all. I have been running V16 for weeks without interruptions. Has anyone experienced this before?

All in all I think we can say that running v17 or P2pool in general is also a real possibility for people with less powerful hardware and people on a budget. Of course if you want to run a public P2pool node you will need more powerful equipment.