estimatesmartfee keep returning "Insufficient data or no feerate found"

darosior commented at 3:55 pm on March 9, 2019: member

On a node I have been running without touching it for about a year, I remarked (with C-lightning not able to fund new channels) that the RPC call estimatesmartfee is always returning

0{
1  "errors": [
2    "Insufficient data or no feerate found"
3  ],
4  "blocks": 0
5}

no matter the conf_target. I have tried to restart it with the more up-to-date version (I was still running 0.16 or so) and after a week (and a mempool of about 10000 transactions) I still cant use estimatesmartfee, where I can on my laptop a minute after the bitcoind server has started.

fanquake commented at 0:48 am on March 11, 2019: member

Any chance that your fee_estimates.dat (inside the data dir) file has been corrupted/isn’t writeable?

If you remove it, does Core create a new one, and does the command work?

Are there any fee_estimates related messages in debug.log? i.e Failed to write fee estimates to /Application Support/Bitcoin/fee_estimates.dat

darosior commented at 1:03 am on March 11, 2019: member

Hi, since yesterday I found out that remove_Tx() (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/1ac7d599f9223afa677f4c034e773713cc7be9be/src/policy/fees.cpp#L512) always returnes false, so I deleted my mempool.dat and let Core waiting for new txs.

There were no such messages in debug.log, I found the remove_Tx problem because I noticed that BlockSpan() and HistoricalBlockSpan() always returned 0. I did not noticed the fee_estimates.dat file, just deleted it.

fanquake added the label TX fees and policy on Mar 11, 2019

darosior commented at 5:12 pm on March 11, 2019: member

At least https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/82ffd4d91832c275f791a17f697534cc677c89fd/test/functional/feature_fee_estimation.py passes, so it has to come from my config..

darosior commented at 4:54 pm on March 13, 2019: member

Ok, so after having removed mempool.dat and fee_estimate.dat and waited for 3 days, I have a mempool of 20000 transactions but the size of fee_estimate.dat has not increased. There is still nothing related to fee estimation in debug.log but the functional test passes. I’m running out of ideas .. Could rescanning the chain solve the problem ? Do you have another suggestion ? EDIT : rescanned the 66000 last blocks and it did not solve it

sipa commented at 4:58 pm on March 13, 2019: member

How big is fee_estimates.dat ?

darosior commented at 5:35 pm on March 13, 2019: member

247985 bytes.

darosior commented at 5:52 pm on March 13, 2019: member

If it can help this line https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/1ac7d599f9223afa677f4c034e773713cc7be9be/src/policy/fees.cpp#L656 outputs

0Blockpolicy estimates updated by 0 of 2473 block txs, since last block 0 of 420 tracked, mempool map size 0, max target 0 from current

(edited)

sipa commented at 5:54 pm on March 13, 2019: member

What’s in your bitcoin.conf? What system/architecture is this on?

darosior commented at 6:00 pm on March 13, 2019: member

0datadir=/path/to/an/external/drive/
1server=1
2rpcallowip=mylaptopip
3debug=estimatefee

I commented last week some parameters I used to decrease the use of resources. I run it on an old computer, on a Debian stretch (64 bits).

darosior commented at 0:28 am on March 18, 2019: member

Update : after 4days the number of block txs and of tracked blocks increase and decrease with time, while others variables stay to 0 :

0Blockpolicy estimates updated by 0 of 3089 block txs, since last block 0 of 5033 tracked, mempool map size 0, max target 0 from current

estimatesmartfee still doesn’t work..

fanquake assigned morcos on Mar 18, 2019

fanquake unassigned morcos on Mar 18, 2019

fanquake commented at 0:32 am on March 18, 2019: member

cc @morcos or @sdaftuar

morcos commented at 2:25 am on March 18, 2019: member

I won’t have much time to look at this this week, but if I had to take a wild guess, maybe IsCurrentForFeeEstimation is failing? Not sure how that could be the case off the top of my head though.

It seems unlikely to be some kind of corruption in fee estimate state if you deleted fee_estimate.dat and restarted the node and the problem continued.

darosior commented at 7:52 pm on March 18, 2019: member

Thank you @morcos, indeed https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/c033c4b5cef89a654e4d9d5c5f9bd823871b068b/src/validation.cpp#L963 is always false because of IsCurrentForFeeEstimation() returning false.

darosior commented at 8:21 pm on March 18, 2019: member

Ok, I found that it was https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/c033c4b5cef89a654e4d9d5c5f9bd823871b068b/src/validation.cpp#L478 which caused it to fail. I have chainActive.Tip()->GetBlockTime() which is inferior of 1 hour to (GetTime() - MAX_FEE_ESTIMATION_TIP_AGE). I will change my system date, reindex and let you know.

MarcoFalke commented at 9:16 pm on March 18, 2019: member

I will change my system date, reindex and let you know.

Why would you need to reindex? Just set the correct time and sync all blocks?

darosior commented at 9:48 pm on March 18, 2019: member

I will change my system date, reindex and let you know.

Why would you need to reindex? Just set the correct time and sync all blocks?

My last block was in the future

darosior commented at 4:39 pm on March 21, 2019: member

It didnt work, so I finally decided to delete the blocks and chainstate directories (which I got back from my laptop) as well as mempool.dat and fee_estimates.dat. I then synced the last few blocks and after some time, I could be able to use estimatesmartefee again. Thanks to all of you who helped :)

darosior closed this on Mar 21, 2019

MarcoFalke locked this on Dec 16, 2021

estimatesmartfee keep returning “Insufficient data or no feerate found” #15568