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!
I contacted @neoxian but i don't know if he has been able to fix it. But can you also help?
Not one witness can fix it. It is a network think like I said. You have to wait and vote for witnesses who are reacting to it.
Hw do i vote for witnesses?
See for example here: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@reggaemuffin/witness-reggaemuffin
I was trying to vote for you but they said the account name is invalid.
Really? Try without the @, just reggaemuffin
Ok. Duo i tried it without the @
Thanks for the deep explanation. I was indeed confused seeing the new bandwith part on steemd. But it makes sense!
Great post reggaemuffin - very informative. U & R'd.
Welcome to Team Australia - we are expecting big things from you!
Be sure to bring yourself up to date with the latest #steemlords happenings too - you just never know when you might get a call up.
@sirknight posting as Team Australia.
https://steemit.com/steemlords/@sirknight/the-steemit-codex-chapter-xxii-the-legend-of-king-arthur-finale
https://steemit.com/steemlords/@sirknight/lord-of-the-steem-awakening
New Update: @rycharde/bandwidth-bug-explained
Thanks for the linkback - upvoted comment.
thank you, for all of your hard work! hmu in steemit.chat if you've got a minute.
Hi @reggaemuffin,
Thanks for this post. I'm still very new to Steemit. I had already begun voting for witnesses, but I stopped at 3 yesterday simply because I didn't want to just be blindly voting for people.
This post was very helpful for me to at least make some votes that I believe will be helpful to the Steemit community. Thanks again 😊
Good post indeed, thanks for this info.
I also like the minnowbooster (hope the upvote will be instant not hours) project, keep it up.
What is your opinion about bots ? feel free to see my latest post about the subject (and the issue about downvoting) and send in your comment. I wish you more success and hope that we stay in touch.
One way to help would be to turn of your welcomebot :P
I signal a larger blocksize for quite some time now ...
Turns out, it was mainly a bug which caused the issues. See github.
these bandwidth limit errors are getting very annoying ,any other option besides larger blocksize?
Yeah. There's news.
Steem needs a bugfix. Update 0.19.1 will help. It's up for review and should be ready in a few days.
ready now. https://steemit.com/witness-category/@sc-steemit/steem-v0-19-1-rc1-released
Most witnesses already updated, where are you? ;)
I'm not updating to an RC, since I don't have a backup server.
I'll wait for a stable release.
It's not an RC it is a real minor update with a hotfix. And you can disable your witness btw. while you upgrade ;)
I'd have to.
Also, I don't have a fallback in case this isn't stable:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.19.1rc1
Well the blocksize increase was a temporarily fix. So it will most likely bump down again. And welcomebot is not even using much ;)
What is a witness?
Witnesses are like the government of steem :)
Great content dude now those having the bandwidth issues know what to do.
Send me your whats up num. In reply
Sorry, not planning to do that. You can talk to me in discord :)
actually, that is a cool mechanism to prevent too much crap made at once. lol. Still learning the #Steemit ways,.
@reggaemuffin good post! i have got this error message too
This is a great explanation, couldn't do anything!
I was definitely curious what was going on. Thanks for the heads up.
Hi @reggaemuffin for this good post i have encounter this issue 3 times in 4 days and really i never overvotes this is a big problem i really don't know what to think about it. Thank for the list of witness i contacted one of them and explain my case.
Hey @ricko99 the parameter is getting better and you should be able to post again. You can use https://steemd.com/@ricko66 to see how much bandwidth you have left :)
Thank you very much
for what i have understand of this article, is that it shows that steemit community is really growing, no one can stop steemit! this is the future of social media platform
Thank you! I was sorting out the cause of this issue and then you came up with nice logic. Upvoted!
thanks for sharing, we all appreciate your work!
It happened to me many time over in a day. I think a minnow is only here to be squeezed among whales and the whole system. I mean come on, steemit was designed to pay per post for ours and now we have to pay steemit with steem power for writing a blog post. Isn't that ironic? Why would we do that?
Being a minnow is a very orenous task already and nnow we have to suffer with this problem also. Steemit is increasing day by day, as a result it's servers are not handlng the traffic effectively.
Actually the traffic is working just fine. It is just these many high frequency votes that were the problem. And you do not need to pay for anything as long as the network is not under attack.
I have this message too!
Fast work!!! Thanks!
Thanks for all thr witnesses I got some help from one of them too.
And thanks for the explanation for what 've happened !
Hey, lucky that @personz sent me a link or I would have missed this. @reggaemuffin, have I been invited to become a witness? Shocked and stunned! What can I say? Let's crack open a few more codes.
Shocked and stunned... and smiling......
@blueorgy is #3 on the first responders list as far as witnesses who posted on the issue. https://steemit.com/witness-category/@blueorgy/witness-consensus-reached-for-maximum-block-size-with-a-median-of-98304
Very considerate of you to mention me , I'm still a new witness but I'll be trying to keep up on the latest issues, the witnesses mentioned in the post defiantly have more pull when it comes to this tho.
That's awesome! I actually got one of those texts. Great to know that the system is fine and work. I also think it's awesome that you highlighted the folks that helped fix the problem. :)
0.19.1 was released and implemented today. Let's hope for the best 💯
Thank you for the explanation!
Very nice
first post I find that explains clearly how the bandwidth works, thanks for the info. I'll be checking your blog for future info.
thank you, I am voting for you as a witness now
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STOPYou have an awesome work done
check my new post
https://steemit.com/uikit/@abkktk/resource-ui-ux-tool-for-web-service
good work
nice post nice friends
Get 0.001 SBD$ and new follower
Just follow @alexKARKI
I'll follow you back
I'll send you 0.001 SBD to your wallet for every UPVOTE my posts
Upvote your newest posting
I read your posts and I have to say I am not really convinced. Maybe that was not your goal, but still.
From my experience as a developer things like this bug happen and once they happen you solve them immediately. I watched the github discussion and the fixes and to me it looked like they saw the issue, thought on how to fix it for a day and then fixed it.
There are always many things TODO in a codebase, you never get time to make it perfect. That is the reality of working on a big project. Adding dependancies is normal. Not merging upstream because something would break is also a thing that happens a lot. It is only that Stinc allows you to watch the process you notice these things.
Also: Correlation does not imply causation
Just because you posted something, all people get to work? Come on, it takes ego to think that. They are probably too busy to read any posts.
On a side note: I voted myself for witness, because I trust in myself as a witness. And my replay was like 2 hours 🐐
Steem is open source. No one stops you from developing for it and fixing bugs. You could probably earn quite a bit from the community too.
There are issues in every architecture, that is how it works, nothing is perfect there are tradeoffs everywhere.
Your critique sounds like you have no idea how Software development looks like. I'm happy to be proven wrong but your arguments are not really convincing.
It really sounds like 'all are evil and plotting xy or following the masters' and that is a heavy claim without any backup facts.