Pruning undo files? #19040

issue jb55 openend this issue on May 21, 2020

jb55 commented at 4:19 pm on May 21, 2020: contributor
Currently these take up around 37GB on a full node, and as far as I can tell they are only used for stats and large reorgs. It would be nice if there was an option to prune these past a minimum of 288 (MIN_BLOCKS_TO_KEEP) blocks if the user:
- does not care for these stats
- is not worried about large reorgs
- doesn’t want to prune blocks
As a side note: txindices currently use 10GB less space than this data.

It doesn’t look like you can just delete these files either: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/71272/are-old-rev-dat-file-safely-deletable
jb55 added the label Feature on May 21, 2020
vasild commented at 10:51 am on June 3, 2020: contributor

Related: https://bitcoincore.reviews/17994.html#l-214
jb55 commented at 4:18 pm on June 4, 2020: contributor

yes a lot of those points by @sipa were brought up when the idea was mentioned awhile back. I’m not convinced that “just run a pruned node” is reasonable suggestion for people who want to keep the full chain for rescan. Although the added complexity is a downside. Loss of stats is a minor inconvenience.
willcl-ark commented at 4:29 pm on September 21, 2023: member

These files are used and useful in several places, and if there is a re-org they are vital.
willcl-ark closed this on Sep 21, 2023
bitcoin locked this on Sep 20, 2024