Massive increase in CPU usage with 1.11.1

[folsen]

• Which Parity version?: 1.11.1
• Which operating system?: Linux
• How installed?: via binaries
• Are you fully synchronized?: yes
• Which network are you connected to?: ethereum
• Did you try to restart the node?: yes

After upgrading from latest 1.10 to 1.11.1 I use way way more CPU, while network usage is down.

[SwaroopH]

Same with us. Even did a full db reset couple of days later to ensure it wasn't some background db upgrade causing the load as you can see the graph.

[AyushyaChitransh]

I'm running:

• Which Parity version?: v1.10.0-unstable-66755be8f-20180206/x86_64-linux-gnu/rustc1.23.0 and v1.12.0-unstable-8057e8df4-20180604/x86_64-linux-gnu/rustc1.26.1
• Which operating system?: Amazon Linux
• How installed?: from source
• Are you fully synchronized?: yes! Fat DB and trace enabled.
• Which network are you connected to?: Private network, PoA chain.
• Did you try to restart the node?: so many times

More attempts to solve this issue: Tried following parameters:

• increased the CPU from 2 core to 4 core
• --no-hardware-wallets did not help.
• --jsonrpc-threads 1 --jsonrpc-server-threads 1
• --no-ancient-blocks also did not resolve the issue.

We are using Amazon Linux, 2 core CPU. This has been a gradual issue in our v1.10.0 versions. We received warnings for CPU usage upto 60% and then those issues transformed gradually into critical issues with CPU usage upto 104%

I am not able to pin this issue to any of these specific things:

• a problem with parity
• Issue with increasing blockchain size
• Issue with server hardware configuration.

Is there any other thing/configuration which may help to resolve these CPU usage problems?

[folsen]

@AyushyaChitransh We're still investigating internally as well. We have some fixes in progress but nothing massive. A big part of the increase in CPU is simply that ethereum has way more transactions (both spam and not), tons of bots trying to outbit each other on DEX'es etc, and processing and relaying all of these transactions takes a lot of CPU, even though most of them don't make it into blocks. This is not the reason 1.11 uses more than 1.10, but it's a big part of why CPU usage has gone up over the last 6 months.

Once we have any solid recommendations, I'll post back to this issue.

[AyushyaChitransh]

In my case, I was monitoring the node using https://github.com/cubedro/eth-net-intelligence-api and as soon as I stopped the monitoring process, CPU usage came to normal in about 10 seconds. This happened three to four times.

I believe the RPC connections are causing the CPU issue in my case. If anyone else is facing this issue, can you verify if switching off RPC resolves this problem?

[tomusdrw]

@AyushyaChitransh what CLI flags are you running with? Do you mind providing logs of running with -lrpc=trace?