Experience Running a Personal PIVX Node
I’ve been keeping up with the development of PIVX for many years, and running a node on and off since around 2021. It’s been a great learning experience, and through staking I hope to one day have enough PIVX to run a masternode.
The staking experience
I say that I’ve been running the node on and off because until recently I experienced many crashes. Down for weeks at a time without my noticing, it took much effort to continuously sync the node with the network. Luckily, a few changes I made to my VPS have put these issues far behind me.
The only real mistake I made was trying to squeeze the node onto as small of a VPS as possible. I have more than enough processing power with 1 vCPU, but 2 GB of RAM was just too slim. Syncing the node uses even more resources, so after one crash I spent hours babysitting the server to catch any subsequent crashes. I eventually had to cave and add some swap space, though not very much! With just 500 MB of swap, I’ve had months of uptime and no issues.
Uptime is paramount to determine the effectiveness of running a node. Before, I was constantly fighting crashes, and the staking rewards were not good enough compensation. Now that the VPS manages the node by itself, I’m truly enjoying staking PIVX.
Takeaway
If you want to run your own PIVX node for staking, I highly recommend that you:
- Have more than 2 GB of RAM, and if you can’t: add swap.
- Run the node through systemd, and specify restarts on failure in your service file.
Here is the service file I currently use:
[Unit]
Description=PIVX daemon
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/pivxd
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=120s
Type=simple
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
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