2.1.0-RC6 is stable. Please load it up on testnet and give us your feedback. Please don’t use on the production network yet. Add this to your nu.conf …
Here are some comments from @sigmike regarding the changes …
“Basically there are 2 main changes: first we merged peercoin/develop which merged bitcoin 0.8.3, so it includes all the changes made between bitcoin 0.6.3 and 0.8.3 (although some of them had already been imported like the raw transactions). The most important change is the switch to leveldb for the block database which triggers a reindex of the whole database on first run, that may take a long time. After that startup should be much faster. The second main change is we do not keep the whole block index in memory anymore. That means the memory usage is reduced, and it won’t grow with each new block anymore. The loaded blocks are removed from memory regularly. They are sill all loaded at startup and removed from memory to build some structures, but this process may be removed in the future for an even faster startup. This change affects the most used structure in the client and it has not been extensively tested yet, so some bugs may remain.”
One of the problems I’ve had is that when I switch units from NuBits to NuShares, the client freezes for a little bit and says not responding before finally switching units. This happens on my faster computer. The slower one that I use for minting has gotten to the point where it seems to freeze and sometimes doesn’t recover at all. Has any work been done on this or is it not a problem for anyone else but me?
I too have had the same problem when switching between units. I’ve noticed that after the Blockchain has been fully updated/downloaded, switching between the units is instantaneous. The problem seems to only occur when it is catching up with the Blockchain.
I’ve had the 2.1.0-RC6 binary running for about 10 hours on 32-bit Linux. I currently see 1 connection to the test network. The blockchain started 66 weeks behind and it’s now 48 weeks behind, so still trying to synch. The client is consuming ~11% of the available 4 Gb RAM.
Yes there are problems with the initial download. You’re banning nodes because you receive blocks that you can’t validate yet because you don’t have the previous transaction. I’ll try to fix that.
Actually some of the problems are specific to testnet and will not be easy to fix. It’s caused by bad parameters on testnet. We may have to restart testnet to make it more similar to mainnet.
In the meantime, to test the 2.1 client you can download the bootstrap file here: http://62.210.25.6/bootstrap.dat (sha256sum: a7a67c3b8459fb3d89e7d9b3600fe4668f510f515288f401cab14671e80164cb)
Put this file into the testnet directory of your datadir (~/.nu/testnet on Linux, C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Nu\testnet on Windows). Then run the client and it will scan this file and update the block index from it. The raw blocks included in the file still needs to be validated and processed so it takes some time.
I have recently taken over the testing for Nu. Since I did not get any feedback from the question posted above I’ve had to run through some extended testing. The re-indexing process takes a long time (almost 24 hours on my host machine) so some test environments have taken a while to set up. I hope to have a finalized response regarding the 2.1 PR by weeks end. It also took me extra time to get back into the flow of testing as I haven’t been involved with the repo for some time. Sorry for the delay on this.
I asked @sigmike to produce these in hopes that it would make it easier for some more community participation in testing 2.1. It contains two fixes:
Seed node fix that prevented the wallet from connecting to nodes on startup
2.0.3 security fix
The delay for 2.1 release at the moment is performance related. It has been identified that (mostly on the Windows client) the wallet will hang often which locks up the user interface for some time. Although we have some leads more help in identifying the circumstances which cause the performance issues would be really helpful. Some things to note about 2.1:
Always backup your wallet files before trying or testing anything new
2.1 uses the newer LevelDB database. Unless you are syncing from scratch your existing database will need to be converted on first boot up. This conversion can take pretty long time depending on your system. Your data files will not be usable with the old client once it’s converted. If you would like to participate in testing it’s probably a good idea to back up your entire.nu data directory before running 2.1. That way you can revert back to the existing database structure and files if need be.
also do not forget to backup your wallet files if you intend to use this as your main wallet.
The performance issues were most apparent on windows, but we would like others running linux to try out the wallet as well. If I can get an OSX build running i’ll try to post it.
Can you tell which version?
In case it’s like with BerkeleyDB, where different versions might not be compatible, it’s necessary to know that when compiling it yourself.
Is it possible to have the source code of 2.1 RC7 pushed to Bitbucket?
Currently there’s only 2.1.0 RC on Bitbucket.
We’ll have to check with @sigmike to see which version he used for the builds.
The RC branch is the source branch for the RC builds, so it contains all of the latest code if i’m not mistaken. We just increment the RC value when builds are produced, but all of the updates are in that single branch. Build from there.