System Configuration

How to configure your operating system to run Arweave

In order to run an Arweave miner efficiently, several operating system defaults should be updated.

0. Recommonded OS: Ubuntu Linux

We recommend running Arweave on Ubuntu Linux 22.04 or 24.04.

1. File Descriptors Limit

The number of available file descriptors affects the rate at which your node can process data. Most operating systems default to assigning a low limit for user processes, we recommend increasing it.

These File Descriptors Limit instructions apply to Linux. When running a VDF Server on MacOS, please refer to the VDF guide.

You can check the current limit by executing ulimit -n.

On Linux, to set a bigger global limit, open /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following line:

fs.file-max=10000000

Execute sysctl -p to make the changes take effect.

You may also need to set a proper limit for the particular user. To set a user-level limit, open /etc/security/limits.conf and add the following line:

<your OS user>         soft    nofile  1000000

Open a new terminal session. To make sure the changes took effect, and the limit was increased, type ulimit -n. You can also change the limit for the current session via ulimit -n 10000000

If the above does not work, set

DefaultLimitNOFILE=1000000

in both /etc/systemd/user.confand /etc/systemd/system.conf

2. Configuring Large Memory Pages

Mining involves computing 1 RandomX hash and several SHA2 hashes every second for every 3.6 TB mining partition. It is not a lot, but your CPU may nevertheless become a bottleneck when you configure a lot of mining partitions. To maximize your hashing performance, consider configuring huge memory pages in your OS.

On Ubuntu, to see the current values, execute:cat /proc/meminfo | grep HugePages. To set a value, run sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=5000. To make the configuration survive reboots, create /etc/sysctl.d/local.conf and put vm.nr_hugepages=5000 there.

The output of cat /proc/meminfo | grep HugePages should then look like this: AnonHugePages: 0 kB ShmemHugePages: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 5000 HugePages_Free: 5000 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0

If it does not or if there is a "erl_drv_rwlock_destroy" error on startup, reboot the machine.

Finally, tell the miner it can use large pages by specifying enable randomx_large_pages on startup (you can find a complete startup example further in the guide).