Bitcoin Core not responding most of the time under Mac OS (Catalina) #19165

Shortly after launch: "Application not responding". It gets difficult to open the settings or do anything else because the Mac OS rotating rainbow circle appears and you can't click anything on the Bitcoin application most of the time. Bitcoin Core 0.20 and previous versions had the same issue.

Hi @bitcoineasy - Are you in the process of the initial block download? What kind of RAM, CPU, disk space, and so forth do you have available on your machine? Is this happening for other applications as well? When you say "most of the time," is there any pattern when it is crashing?

Try launching with -nowallet or -disablewallet and lets us know the result.

I found the issue. I chose an external HDD (G-Drive Mobile USBC) as file path because I wanted to download the entire blockchain and don't have enough space on my laptop. Now I am downloading and pruning the blockchain to the internal hard drive and the problem does not occur.

@MarcoFalke I think this should be closed, but maybe we want an issue with a good description? "Application not responding when there's no space to download the blockchain" or something. The issue is ideally reproduced before that is opened :)

Maybe a good candidate for good first issue.

The most accurate description in my case would be: Application not responding when using custom data directory on external HDD.

• Mac OSX Catalina
• no pruning

External HDD are not supported. I don't think anyone ever was running Bitcoin Core successfully on them.

it should be possible to store the blockchain on an external hard drive. Most people don't have 320gb free space on their laptops and the blockchain only keeps growing.

A notice on the Bitcoin Core welcome screen explaining that external hard drives are not supported would be helpful.

External HDD are not supported.

really? I thought that's what -blocksdir was for?

I haven't tested blocksdir myself, but there is more than one reported issue that leveldb can't store the utxo set (which is in the datadir, not the blocksdir) on external storage.

I have the same issue. Yes, also external USB3 harddisk. The raw transfer rate (linear and random reads) are slower than internal harddisks, yes. But this alone would not explain this bizarre behavior.

1. Lightcoin client stores its blockchain on the same partition (in another path, of course) and runs fine. The data structures of Lightcoin should not differ so much that to Bitcoin, I think.
2. the partition is filled to 35%, so "disk full" is not an explanation (and if it were, I'd expect a proper error message but not an "unresponsive" program. Same if other data cannot be written, for whatever reason.

I continue to have issue with external harddrive. I was running off Mac mini using M1 chip, brand new with 500GB storage. After blockchain clogged it up I moved to external HD. When opening bitcoin core screen hanging at "done downloading" I then have to force quit.

@Gchowdhury1988 : The weird thing is: The BTC client does not hang completely. It still runs, but its GUI is veeeery unresponsive all the time. With enough patience it still syncs to the network and after some days it is "up to date". I still miss a real explanation what BTC does differently than Lightcoin or Dogecoin, whose clients run without any problems on the same USB harddrive. (And of course: Why does the GUI hang when there are blocking disk I/O operations? I'd expect that disk I/O is done via async operations and/or in different threads).

@Gchowdhury1988 : The weird thing is: The BTC client does not hang completely. It still runs, but its GUI is veeeery unresponsive all the time. With enough patience it still syncs to the network and after some days it is "up to date". I still miss a real explanation what BTC does differently than Lightcoin or Dogecoin, whose clients run without any problems on the same USB harddrive. (And of course: Why does the GUI hang when there are blocking disk I/O operations? I'd expect that disk I/O is done via async operations and/or in different threads).

• So what you are saying is that after over a year of this issue being open it is still unresolved. My best course of action to run a node is therefore to setup a dedicated raspi blitz? My Mac Mini which I otherwise bought primarily to run a node, isn't functional for anything else if all the storage is used up! :(

Thanks for writing back.

@Gchowdhury1988

I continue to have issue with external harddrive. I was running off Mac mini using M1 chip, brand new with 500GB storage. After blockchain clogged it up I moved to external HD.

Could you try to use your external HD for block storage only using the -blocksdir option, and leaving the datadir on its default location?