Post
Topic
Board Armory
Re: Armory - Discussion Thread
by
halfawake
on 20/09/2013, 05:41:46 UTC
I have a question about the upcoming RAM-reduction update.  Will there be any option for people to turn off the more hard-drive intensive version of Armory and keep the RAM-intensive version for people who have a lot of RAM?  I don't know if this would be a major pain to code or not, but it'd be a nice feature to have.

I guess, for now you could just keep using the old version.  But going forward, it will be kind of tough to do what you just suggested.  However, there will be lighter-weight modes implemented that will use less RAM and HDD, though, it might have slightly watered-down functionality (not being able view arbitrary transactions or fees on some incoming tx).  I'll keep it in mind, though.  I'm sure there's lot of server applications where the user has more than enough RAM, and would prefer the performance.

At the moment, while there's only one version of Armory that everyone uses (no super-node, regular-node, lite-node split), RAM is much more scarce than HDD space.  But these kinds of things are great to keep in mind so I don't burn any code bridges if there's a chance they will be in high demand in the future (when I've got different modes).

It's probably a seriously non-trivial thing to do, code wise.  Mostly the reason I was curious is that this kind of update would effectively double the hard drive demands of bitcoin since you'd have the 11.9 GB of the blockchain that bitcoin-qt manages, and the (presumably also) 11.9 GB of space that Armory would require from what you mentioned earlier.  24 GB is kind of a lot of space just to be able to keep Armory running happily, even in the era of hard drives with a lot of space.