Bandwidth Limit Exceeded? How Witnesses Help You.
A lot of people have gotten this error message within the past few days:
"bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait to transact, or power up STEEM."
img source @geordieprepper via /bandwidth-limit-exceeded?
In this post, I will give an overview of what happened in layman's terms and then tell you what to do to fix it.
Spoiler: Vote for witnesses who responded quickly.
What happened
Bandwidth is a system to ensure that the Steem blockchain does not get flooded too easily. Basically the more SP you have the more bandwidth you have available for voting, commenting, following other users and generally using steem.
How much bandwidth each action costs is influenced by the current_reserve_ratio. That parameter will kick in when the network is under active attack and makes each action hundreds of times more expensive, making attacks more difficult.
So what happened? High-frequency, low percentage voting caused unprecedented strain on the network and the bandwidth safety mechanism kicked in to protect the network. We noticed many minnows doing these small votes and they essentially used up all their bandwidth and got locked out. This then also affected other minnows who just did not have enough SP.
The witnesses reacted quickly, our parameter is going up again and therefore lowering the requirements as we speak. More and more minnows will be able to post again the next days.
How witnesses helped
Immediately after the first reports of the bandwidth issues, many witnesses set out to find the root cause of this problem.
It was quickly discovered that the current_reserve_ratio parameter was the reason and that increasing the block size would temporarily fix this.
So while we told other witnesses about the problem and they increased the block size, the steem developers started to work on a fix that I will review shortly.
This fix will be part of softfork 0.19.1 and will hopefully ensure this problem will not happen again.
How can You help?
Vote for witnesses who responded quickly. Many responded immediately, but were lacking the votes to actually change anything. You decide who is a top witness and those top witnesses are the ones who can quickly resolve issues. So if you vote for witnesses who were quick to react, you put them in a better position for next time an issue occurs and simultaneously send a statement to those who don't.
Who responded
In my opinion, these witnesses reacted swiftly to the change and mobilized others (in no particular order):
@personz @gtg @someguy123 @reggaemuffin @liberosist @drakos @lukestokes @timcliff @neoxian @ausbitbank and soon to be witness @rycharde
This list is probably not complete, so use the comments to tell which witness helped you the most :)
Thank you @reggaemuffin for the explanation. I have some comments that I would like to share:
1- The role of witnesses is becoming more and more important for the success of steemit on the long run. I intend to give more time to learn about their responsibilities and to evaluate their contributions to decide who are the ones I am going to vote for. The reason is that I am planning to invest a good deal of money and time in Steem, and I believe that having good witnesses can help a lot in improving the blockchain and the site.
2- I had already voted for the some of the witnesses you mentioned like @timcliff, @ausbitbank and @someguy123. They are active contributors to Steem: the system, the site, and the community. I recommend everybody upvote them too. Upvoting good witnesses is a mainly a services to ourselves (the community).
3- Following your recommendation, I will upvote the rest of the witnesses on the list. Thank you all for your efforts.
4- If you are new to steemit and you do not know where to vote, This is the link to the page.
5- BTW, @personz name on the witnesses page is personzzz (with three z's. That confused me at the begenning. I suggest (he/she) fixes it.
6- I could not vote for @rycharde. What should I do?
Thanks 😊 Sorry about the name confusion, I wanted to have a different account for security reasons, it's not a mistake. If I see anyone voting for me as @personz I usually message them directly to change to @personzzz
@rycharde is not a witness, but many think he should be! Follow his account I guess and if he decides to you'll know about it. I'd vote for him smart guy and going to a lot of effort to discover issues
Oh, I have voted for the @personz account as a witness. Should I change it to @personzzz?
Yes, I agree. @rycharde is active enough to be a witness. I will follow him.
Yes please :)
Done :)
dope! There's 4 on your "quick responding witness" list I do not know yet. I'm enjoying learning who the witnesses are.
Feel free to vote for us as witnesses ;)
Related Post: [Easy Witness Voting Guide - Bandwidth Limit Solution]
Great write up, helped me uubderstand much more. #yunk community thanks the witnesses! 🙏
Thanks for the explanation! It did indeed happen to me the other day, even though I didn't think I had been doing all that much. Although, it sorted itself out a few minutes later and no issues since. I guess that's all part of the development process!
We are currently in a state that most minnows can interact again. At least we now know that in case of an attack that parameter really works...
Yeah I had this problem yesterday, just after wanting to post my first reaction of the day. Luckily this issue past after 5 minutes of waiting.
I think it's really good they make use of such mechanic to ensure this platform stays relevant, and not some dark place where people spam 1000x post and things each day.
Quick question, if you resteem a post, does this also require bandwith? I hope it does, so people stop resteeming 50 post an hour.
Thank you for the post, I really enjoyed reading it and it was very very educative! :D
A resteem costs bandwidth but not that much. I think it costs more to upvote or follow.
Thank you :) Glad thinks are settling a bit.
hey @reggaemuffin !!
thanks for this post.......... i'm also facing this issue.thanks.
upvoted you.
Check if you are using auto voting tools and pause them for now. And probably tomorrow you can do things again :)
Witness dream team + quick work on the github issue is why I love this community. Votes should fully reflect these folks doin the dirty work!
Did you increase your block size to 131072? Also do you find that having some APR (0.1%) is better than not having any at all?
I moved it back down after the fix and apr is to support the SBD price a bit. Will adapt that slowly after segwit...
Already supporting @austibank here, thanks for letting us know. As a dolphin, I had no clue this was happening.
this article has been referenced in: down the rabit hole -
the case of the bandwidth bug
Thanks for writing!