It turns out that some miners have been staying with old versions of
Bitcoin Core because their software behaves poorly with persistent
connections and the Bitcoin Core thread and connection limits.
What happens is that underlying HTTP libraries leave connections open
invisibly to their users and then the user runs into the default four
thread limit. This looks like Bitcoin Core is unresponsive to RPC.
There are many things that should be improved in Bitcoin Core's behavior
here, e.g. supporting more concurrent connections, not tying up threads
for idle connections, disconnecting kept-alive connections when limits
are reached, etc. All are fairly big, risky changes.
Disabling keep-alive is a simple workaround. It's often not easy to turn
off the keep-alive support in the client where it may be buried in some
platform library.
If you are one of the few who really needs persistent connections you
probably know that you want them and can find a switch; while if you
don't and the misbehavior is hitting you it is hard to discover the
source of your problems is keepalive related. Given that it is best
to default to off until they're handled better.
Github-Merge: #5655
Rebased-From: 16a5c18cea56c1093dae1dd8ee72af
This will disconnect peers that do not transfer a block in 10 minutes, plus
5 minutes for every previously queued block with validated headers
(accomodating downstream bandwidth down to a few kilobytes per second - below
that the node would have trouble staying synchronized anyway).
Github-Pull: #5608
Rebased-From: 916130348c
Client crashes about every 24h on mainnet (with lots of masternodes)
and very rarely on testnet. AcceptableInputs has no need to check
HaveCoins as AcceptToMemoryPool does and would rarely cause the
segfault to occur.
Not necessary for windows or linux, as the intermedate build result
doesn't change.
However for OSX on 0.9 the builds for the intermediates are not
deterministic, so this cannot be assessed. Bump the dep version just in
case.
