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mining: add getMemoryLoad() and track template non-mempool memory footprint#33922

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Sjors:2025/11/ipc-memusage
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mining: add getMemoryLoad() and track template non-mempool memory footprint#33922
Sjors wants to merge 16 commits into
bitcoin:masterfrom
Sjors:2025/11/ipc-memusage

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@Sjors

@Sjors Sjors commented Nov 21, 2025

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Implements a way to track the memory footprint of all non-mempool transactions that are still being referenced by block templates, see discussion in #33899. It does not impose a limit.

IPC clients can query this footprint (total, across all clients) using the getMemoryLoad() IPC method. Its client-side usage is demonstrated here:

Additionally, the functional test in interface_ipc.py is expanded to demonstrate how template memory management works: templates are not released until the client drops references to them, or calls the template destroy method, or disconnects. The destroy method is called automatically by clients using libmultiprocess, as sv2-tp does. In the Python tests it also happens when references are destroyed or go out of scope.

Based on:

Commits:

  • refactor: move CTransactionRefComp to util/hasher
  • mining: track non-mempool memory usage: add TxTemplateMap to BlockTemplateManager to track how many templates contain any given transaction. This map is updated by the BlockTemplate constructor and destructor.
  • mining: add GetTemplateMemoryUsage() - loops over this map and sums up the memory footprint for transactions outside the mempool (includes a fuzzer)
  • ipc: add getMemoryLoad() expose this information to IPC clients and add test coverage

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The following sections might be updated with supplementary metadata relevant to reviewers and maintainers.

Code Coverage & Benchmarks

For details see: https://corecheck.dev/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls/33922.

Reviews

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Type Reviewers
Concept ACK ismaelsadeeq, ryanofsky
Stale ACK enirox001, vasild

If your review is incorrectly listed, please copy-paste <!--meta-tag:bot-skip--> into the comment that the bot should ignore.

Conflicts

Reviewers, this pull request conflicts with the following ones:

  • #35675 (mining: add block template manager by ismaelsadeeq)
  • #35671 (mining: add TxCollection to bandwidth-efficiently validate external block templates by Sjors)
  • #35646 (RFC: Separate out runtime errors from BlockValidationState using util::Expected by yuvicc)
  • #35581 (node: add block template manager and track waitNext fee inflow by ismaelsadeeq)
  • #35482 (fuzz: exercise the transaction-handling path in process_message(s) by HowHsu)
  • #35016 (net: deduplicate private broadcast state and snapshot types by kenji-yamam0to)
  • #34995 (iwyu: Fix warnings in src/common and treat them as errors by hebasto)
  • #34803 (mempool: asynchronous mempool fee rate diagram updates via validation interface by ismaelsadeeq)
  • #34672 (mining: add reason/debug to submitSolution and unify with submitBlock by w0xlt)
  • #34565 (refactor: extract BlockDownloadManager from PeerManagerImpl by w0xlt)
  • #34075 (fees: Introduce Mempool Based Fee Estimation to reduce overestimation by ismaelsadeeq)
  • #32468 (rpc: generateblock to allow multiple outputs by polespinasa)
  • #31260 (scripted-diff: Type-safe settings retrieval by ryanofsky)
  • #31117 (miner: Reorg Testnet4 minimum difficulty blocks by fjahr)
  • #30342 (kernel, logging: Pass Logger instances to kernel objects by ryanofsky)
  • #29700 (kernel, refactor: return error status on all fatal errors by ryanofsky)

If you consider this pull request important, please also help to review the conflicting pull requests. Ideally, start with the one that should be merged first.

@Sjors

Sjors commented Nov 21, 2025

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I haven't benchmarked this yet on mainnet, so I'm not sure if checking every (unique) transaction for mempool presence is unacceptably expensive.

If people prefer, I could also add a way for the getblocktemplate RPC to opt-out of the memory bookkeeping, since it holds on to one template max and no longer than a minute.

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🚧 At least one of the CI tasks failed.
Task tidy: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/actions/runs/19575422916/job/56059300316
LLM reason (✨ experimental): clang-tidy flagged fatal errors (loop variable copied for range-based for causing a warnings-as-errors failure) in interfaces.cpp, breaking the CI run.

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Try to run the tests locally, according to the documentation. However, a CI failure may still
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  • Possibly due to a silent merge conflict (the changes in this pull request being
    incompatible with the current code in the target branch). If so, make sure to rebase on the latest
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  • A sanitizer issue, which can only be found by compiling with the sanitizer and running the
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  • An intermittent issue.

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Comment thread src/node/interfaces.cpp Outdated

TxTemplateMap& tx_refs{*Assert(m_tx_template_refs)};
// Don't track the dummy coinbase, because it can be modified in-place
// by submitSolution()

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b9306b79b8f5667a2679236af8792bb1c36db817: in addition, we might be wiping the dummy coinbase from the template later: Sjors#106

@Sjors
Sjors force-pushed the 2025/11/ipc-memusage branch from f22413f to 3b77529 Compare November 21, 2025 16:22

@ismaelsadeeq ismaelsadeeq left a comment

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Concept ACK

I think it would be better if we have internal memory management for the mining interface IPC, since we hold on to the block templates.

I would suggest the following approach:

  • Add memory budget for the mining interface.
  • Introduce a tracking list of recently built block templates and total memory usage.
  • Add templates to the list and increment the memory usage after every createnewblock or waitnext return.
  • Whenever the memory budget is exhausted, we should release templates in FIFO order.

I think since we create a new template after a time interval elapses even if fees increase and that interval is usually enough for the client to receive and distribute the template to miners, this mechanism should be safe as the miners have long switch to most recent template when the budget elapsed because of the time interval being used in between returns of waitnext.

Mining interface clients should also handle their own memory internally.

Currently, I don’t see much use for the exposed getMemoryLoad method. In my opinion, we should not rely on the IPC client to manage our memory.

@Sjors

Sjors commented Nov 21, 2025

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In my opinion, we should not rely on the IPC client to manage our memory.

Whenever the memory budget is exhausted, we should release templates in FIFO order

It seems counter intuitive, but from a memory management perspective IPC clients are treated no different than our own code. And if we started FIFO deleting templates that are used by our own code, we'd crash.

So I think FIFO deletion should be a last resort (not implemented here).

There's another reason why we should give clients an opportunity to gracefully release templates in whatever order they prefer. Maybe there's 100 downstream ASIC's, one of which is very slow at loading templates, so it's only given a new template when the tip changes, not when there's a fee change. In that scenario you have a specific template that the client wants to "defend" at all cost.

In practice I'm hoping none of this matters and we can pick and recommend defaults that make it unlikely to get close to a memory limit, other than during some weird token launch.

@ismaelsadeeq

ismaelsadeeq commented Nov 21, 2025

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It seems counter intuitive, but from a memory management perspective IPC clients are treated no different than our own code. And if we started FIFO deleting templates that are used by our own code, we'd crash.

IMHO I think we should separate that, and treat clients differently from our own code, because they are different codebases and separate applications with their own memory.

Maybe there are 100 downstream ASICs, one of which is very slow at loading templates, so it’s only given a new template when the tip changes, not when there’s a fee change. In that scenario you have a specific template that the client wants to “defend” at all costs.

I see your point but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario, and I think we shouldn’t design software to be one-size-fits-all.
If you want to use only single block templates, then use createnewblock and create a new block template and mine that continuously until the chain tip changes or you mine a block.

waitNext returning indicates that we assume your miners are switching from the block they are currently mining to the new one they receive.
Depending on the budget (which I assume is large), many templates would need to be returned before we exhaust it.

Delegating template eviction responsibility to the client can put us in a situation where they handle it poorly and cause us to OOM (but I guess your argument is that we rather take that chance than being in a situation where we make miners potentially lose on rewards).
However I think if there is a clean separation of concerns between the Bitcoin Core node and its clients and clear interface definition and expectations that should not happen, and I believe the mining interface should not differ in that respect.
Otherwise, if we do want a one-size-fits-all solution capable of handling the scenario you described, we should rethink the design entirely and revert to an approach where we do not retain block templates.

@Sjors

Sjors commented Nov 24, 2025

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Delegating template eviction responsibility to the client can put us in a situation where they handle it poorly and cause us to OOM

Note that it's already the clients responsibility, that's inherent to how multiprocess works.

In the scenario where they handle it poorly, we can use FIFO deletion. All getMemoryLoad() does is give clients an opportunity to handle it better. If they're fine with FIFO, then they never have to call this method.

treat clients differently from our own code

We currently don't track whether any given CBlockTemplate is owned by an IPC client or by our internal code. Once we introduce FIFO deletion all call sites will have to check if it's been deleted since, or we need to exempt them from the memory accounting.

an approach where we do not retain block templates.

Afaik that means revalidating the block from scratch, removing one advantage the submitBlock() approach has over the submitblock RPC (I haven't benchmarked this though).

@Sjors

Sjors commented Nov 24, 2025

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I tracked the non-mempool transaction memory footprint for half a day on mainnet, using fairly aggressive template update criteria (minimum fee delta 1 sat and no more than once per second). So far the footprint is minuscule, but of course this depends on the mempool weather:

getmemoryload-scatter

The memory spike after each new block is because sv2-tp holds on to templates from previous blocks for 10 seconds. Those ~3 MB spikes may look impressive, but keep in mind that the default mempool is 300 MB.

@Sjors

Sjors commented Nov 25, 2025

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I restructured the implementation and commits a bit.

The TxTemplateMap now lives on the NodeContext rather than MinerImpl (interface). This reflects the fact that we want to track the global memory footprint instead of per client. It's a lightweight member template_tx_refs which should be easy to fold into a block template manager later.

It's also less code churn because I don't have to touch the BlockTemplateImpl constructor.

It also made it easier to move GetTemplateMemoryUsage from interface.cpp to miner.cpp, where it's more reusable.

This in turn let me split out a separate commit that introduces the actual getMemoryLoad() interface method. So even if we decide against including that method, the rest of the PR should be useful. However I do think it's worth keeping, it's already been a helpful debugging and monitoring tool.

I added some comments to point out that we don't hold a mempool.cs lock during the calculation because we don't need an accurate result (mempool drift) and we don't want to bog down transaction relay with a potentially long lock (1-3ms in my testing so far).

@Sjors
Sjors force-pushed the 2025/11/ipc-memusage branch from 24592b7 to 03dcfae Compare November 25, 2025 17:21
@Sjors

Sjors commented Nov 25, 2025

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mining_getblocktemplate_longpoll.py triggered a stack-use-after-return, due to block_template being static (to allow template reuse between RPC calls). I added a commit d752dccaa56b663001d1bb29ab8b9a50628602a9 to move this longpoll template to the node context. This seems more appropriate anyway since BlockTemplate has a m_node member, so it shouldn't be able to outlive the node.

One caveat is that gbt_template has to be cleared before template_tx_refs, so I swapped them and added a comment (cde248a6613b6e37f7f7e35c1aabeb75347ffe95 -> 9c667c362a1639b48113a3657882b751f475082c.


Expanded the PR description.

ismaelsadeeq and others added 16 commits July 16, 2026 13:05
Add BlockTemplateManager, a wrapper around
BlockAssembler::CreateNewBlock(), and a unit test that verifies a block
template can be created through it.
Pass the parsed mining args to BlockTemplateManager at construction
and expose them via BlockCreateArgs(), so the manager owns the
init-time block create options instead of NodeContext.
Move SubmitBlockStateCatcher and SubmitBlock from miner.cpp into
BlockTemplateManager as a member function. This groups block submission
with block creation in the same class. The function uses m_chainman
directly instead of taking it as a parameter.
Move the mining tip lookup and block-template waiting helpers (GetTip,
WaitTipChanged, WaitAndCreateNewBlock, InterruptWait,
CooldownIfHeadersAhead) into BlockTemplateManager so the manager owns
the template waiting flow. The manager now takes KernelNotifications
at construction.
Route the Mining interface's createNewBlock() through
BlockTemplateManager::CreateNewTemplate() instead of constructing a
BlockAssembler directly. Merging the init-time defaults into unset
options now happens inside CreateNewTemplate(), so every caller gets
them applied.
Add the EnsureBlockTemplateManager RPC accessor and a WaitTipChanged
convenience overload for in-process callers without an interrupt
handle, and use them to build getblocktemplate directly through
BlockTemplateManager.

getblocktemplate is no longer safe for fuzzing: with the block
template manager available in the fuzz setup, the longpoll path now
blocks until a tip change or timeout.
generateblock is no longer safe for fuzzing: with the block template
manager available in the fuzz setup, it now builds, mines and submits
a block.
The waitforblock, waitforblockheight and waitfornewblock RPCs are no
longer safe for fuzzing: with the block template manager available in
the fuzz setup, they now block until a tip change or timeout.
All in-process callers now go through BlockTemplateManager directly.
Add a fuzz target that creates block templates through
BlockTemplateManager under fuzzed mining options and checks template
invariants: reserved weight plus selected transaction weight stays
within the block weight limit, coinbase reserved sigops plus selected
transaction sigops stay within the block sigops limit, the per-tx fee
and sigops vectors track the block excluding the coinbase, fees are
non-negative, and templates built without the mempool contain only the
coinbase.
IPC clients can hold on to block templates indefinately, which has the
same impact as when the node holds a shared pointer to the
CBlockTemplate. Because each template in turn tracks CTransactionRefs,
transactions that are removed from the mempool will not have
their memory cleared.

This commit adds bookkeeping to the block template constructor and
destructor that will let us track the resulting memory footprint.

Co-authored-by: Vasil Dimov <vd@FreeBSD.org>
Calculate the non-mempool memory footprint for template transaction
references.

Add bench logging to collect data on whether caching or simplified
heuristics are needed, such as not checking for mempool presence.

Check the calculation in the block template manager fuzz test.
Allow IPC clients to inspect the amount of memory consumed by
non-mempool transactions in blocks.

Returns a MemoryLoad struct which can later be expanded to e.g.
include a limit.

Expand the interface_ipc.py test to demonstrate the behavior and
to illustrate how clients can call destroy() to reduce memory
pressure.
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🚧 At least one of the CI tasks failed.
Task iwyu: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/actions/runs/29504258847/job/87640797555
LLM reason (✨ experimental): CI failed because IWYU detected required include changes (failure generated from IWYU, causing the test script to exit non-zero).

Hints

Try to run the tests locally, according to the documentation. However, a CI failure may still
happen due to a number of reasons, for example:

  • Possibly due to a silent merge conflict (the changes in this pull request being
    incompatible with the current code in the target branch). If so, make sure to rebase on the latest
    commit of the target branch.

  • A sanitizer issue, which can only be found by compiling with the sanitizer and running the
    affected test.

  • An intermittent issue.

Leave a comment here, if you need help tracking down a confusing failure.

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