BCH Stress Test Clogs Network

A stress test clogged the Bitcoin Cash network over the weekend.

Transactions exceeded usual volumes more than 10 times:

But this time stress test caused significant mempool congestion:

Reddit users discovered that three large BCH pools produce blocks with default configuration settings that limits size to 2MB:

Jameson Lopp @lopp recapped this stress test as following:

• Bottlenecks caused services such as the transaction generators to slow & error out, preventing mempool from exceeding 22 MB
• Largest block: 21.35 MB
• Avg block size was ~3.6 MB: 11% of max capacity
• 16% of Bitcoin ABC nodes dropped off the network

The BCH network is secured by 1,463 nodes, of which 764 are following the Bitcoin ABC version.

ABC upgrades limit block size to 2 MB by default, although there is no limit and larger blocks are allowed when needed.

Bitcoin SV chain that branched off last November is setting large blocks as a goal.

An extreme devactivity spike can be seen 10 days before test: