Are High Disk Writes Expected? #264
Description
I have been running Bitcoin Core 27.0 with txindex=1 and ElectrumX 1.16.0 on a Samsung 860 Evo SSD on Xubuntu. This is a dedicated machine doing nothing but running those two programs all day. I've also been using smartmontools to monitor the total disk writes once a day over time, and I've noticed the numbers are shockingly high. Obviously this is a concern since SSDs can only perform so many writes before they die.
Unfortunately, I only have a few data points right now, but all of these were recorded AFTER both the initial block download and after the transaction index was finished being built:
30 total gigabytes written to the SSD from June 24th to June 25th
108 total gigabytes written to the SSD from June 25th to June 26th
158 total gigabytes written to the SSD from June 26th to June 27th
To be clear, this is the difference in total GiB (512 bytes * Total LBAs Written /1024**3) written to the disk from day to day, not actual capacity being used. The amount of disk space being used is about what I would expect (increasing a few hundred megabytes per day).
I'm getting the LBAs written from smartmontools using:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
and pulling the Total_LBAs_Written field, in case anybody else wants to try to monitor this for themselves and compare.
Obviously there's a lot more testing I need to do before I can determine what's causing this for sure but of course my intuition is that it's either related to Bitcoin Core or ElectrumX since the machine is dedicated to running them.
It is also possible I have the LBA size wrong for this drive and I'm inflating the gigabytes written without realizing it, but 512 bytes is standard from what I can tell.
Do these disk write numbers seem reasonable to you, or are these way too high?