Expected Data Consumption for running a Farmer & Node?

Support
1

From Discord User Teslak

I am measuring my network usage and so far 2000 blocks have used ~15GB of data, for the current target of ~32,000 blocks this means im looking at about 240GB of data consumed to sync?

Im monitoring with two different methods

  1. Docker Stats

  2. Using nlbwmon on my router (OpenWRT)

    image
    image1011×551 74 KB

The router is monitoring traffic on TCP port 30333.

I really think you guys should clearly mention that initial sync is going to use ~250GB of internet data. I have a 1.25TB monthly cap from my ISP. Thats a huge percentage of it!

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We are seeing more complaints of excessive data usage on device farming on the network.

Additionally we have seen users complain off all other devices being kicked off their wifi network during farming and syncing. Some users are becoming quite frustrated with these issues, definitely something we will want to look into.

@nazar-pc @liu-cheng @ivan-subspace

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Yes the data usage is way too extreme and will probably end up making running a node during this testnet and beyond not being profitable.

I’ve ended up using 180gb now but only 2gb seems to have been plotted according to what the folder directory suggests.

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This is expected, but blocks are not of the equal size. Gemini was seeded with 100G so that space provided by the farmers would be utilized. Right now the network won’t exceed 100G that much, as right after that blocks are supposed to be almost empty.

In the future, we’re planning to use torrent like algorithm in order to download storage which is required for the farming. So during the initial sync you will download at maximum the amount of storage which you provided.

To sum up, right now you will download the whole chain during the initial sync, but it shouldn’t be larger than ~110G, We’re working on improving that so that you will download only part of the chain which you will use for the farming and that would let us speed up initial sync and have even more data stored on chain

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Excessive bandwidth usage is partially caused by sync issues where nodes download and broadcast unnecessary blocks. This will improve as nodes upgrade and we improve software.

However since protocol is proof-of-archival-storage of the blockchain itself, nodes will need to at least download some data during initial sync process.

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