The Chia network is developed by Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent. As such, the Chia Client uses a peer-to-peer network to download the blockchain. Recently however, there has been an explosion of new people wanting to farm Chia. This means that the synchronization times of the blockchain is going through the roof. We’re talking hours here. To help mitigate this, there are a few things you can do to ensure that you have no roadblocks in the way.
I will be a bit high-level on this subject because there are so many configurations out there that I can’t possibly cover them all. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction. If you are having synchronization issues, perform the following:
- Windows Firewall – Make sure that the chia client is allowed through the firewall. A no brainer, but doesn’t hurt to check.
- Router update – Install the latest update to your router. This isn’t required, but it has helped some people fix their sync issue.
- UPNP errors – Check the Chia Client log and make sure you don’t have any UPNP errors. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, follow this and come back. Just search the log for “UPNP”. If you do have UPNP errors, this means your router does not have it enabled (which is good security-wise) but bad for the Chia Client. Essentially, only you can connect out to peers but no one can connect to you. Plus you will be limited to 10 peers instead of 50. To fix this, and keep UPNP disabled on the router, you must Forward port 8444 in your router. Then you must change the config file to disable UPNP by changing the following value:
enable_upnp = falseRestart the Chia Client when this is complete.
4. Timezone Settings – Make sure that your time is correct. On Windows, if you have “Set Time Zone Automatically” selected, it may cause sync issues due to incorrect time. Turn off “Automatic Timezone” but keep “Automatic Time”. Manually Select your Timezone to the correct one. Then Synchronize the time with the Windows Time Server.
5. Router on Router? – Some people have a modem/router combo from their ISP for their internet service. Then, they piggy back their own router off this one. If this is you, remember that if you forward port 8444 on your router you also have to forward it on the ISP modem/router.
6. Port Check – Once port 8444 has been forwarded, you need to check if the port is actually open from the outside. Go to this website and enter port 8444 to check. It should fill out your Public IP address automatically: https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/
Edit: Thank you to Anees in the comment section for making me realize I was missing step 6.
7. Add A Chia Introducer – This is a Last Resort. If you are still having sync issues and not connecting to peers, add one of the following IP address in your Chia Client. These are listed on the Chia Teams GitHub page. Don’t add all of them (Thanks willphule!) Just click the “Connect to other Peers” button in the Chia Client and add the IP/port:
North Asia: introducer-apne.chia.net:8444
South Asia: introducer-apse.chia.net:8444
Western North America: introducer-or.chia.net:8444
Eastern North America: introducer-va.chia.net:8444
Europe: introducer-eu.chia.net:8444These are the things you can do and check to ensure that there are no roadblocks preventing the syncing of the block chain. As I come across more solutions, I will add them to this page.
Please note that you should only use ONE introducer, the one in your location – please do not add all three. Also be aware that the introducers are scheduled to be removed later this year.
I found that releasing and renewing my ipconfig from command prompt worked even when UPNP was enabled on my router and with no firewall or antivirus.
Hi Troy, You mean that you were having sync issues and all you did was release/renew your IP?
Hi Alex, great blog.
I’ve disabled UPNP on my router and set it to false in the config file. I’ve restarted Chia, and currently at 4 peers. Port 8444 is open. Do I understand correctly that we should be having 50 connected peers? Thanks, Anees
Hi Anees, yes you should get 50 peers over time. How long has it been online for?
Four days straight. I was stuck at 10 peers. Came across your blog -> disabled UPNP on the router, changed the config to false, restarted and now back up to 10….seems to be stuck at 10. Shall I use one of the introducers?
You have made me realize that I forgot an important aspect of opening 8444. You need to check from the outside that 8444 is open. I will add this to the post, but to answer you quickly, go here enter the port to check. It should auto detect your public IP address and fill it in: https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/. I
Alex – in my case after making the changes restarting the router was what made it work
how do you do to get 50 perrs ? i only get 10
Hi Luis, This means that UPnP might be disabled on your router. You can port forward 8444 or enable UPnP.
One point worth mentioning is that you need to add a rule to your firewall to allow traffic in from ANY port to 8444.
I’m using Comodo firewall and I added a global rule to allow traffic in from 8444 to 8444, as I thought that was all it needed and the port forward rule on my router would just be forwarding traffic from/to that port. I had about 16 peers connected, so I thought it was fine but then I had a problem with the Last Attempted Proofs only updating occasionally and the dates/times being out of order and it was only whilst researching this that I realised I needed to change the firewall rule.
from ANY port (1-65535) to 8444? That can’t be right…
– Giant security risk
– You can’t have any other port forwards if everything goes to your Chia farmer.
– I’m sure there’s an official port range? I can hardly believe the designer of the Chia network intended to use ALL ports.
On second read i see you’ve mixed up 2 things in your first line, being firewall rules and port forwarding. You can allow the chia client through the firewall, that’s fine, also let the port(s) associated with it through the firewall.
Your line: “..a rule to your firewall to allow traffic in from ANY port to 8444. ” mixes the 2 things up. Port forwarding from outside to inside your network (WAN to LAN) people should forward 8444 to your static internal IP address on the same port (8144).
if i’m mistaken, please let me know.
Hi Jelle, You make a good point. The way I wrote it before might confuse people, so I took it out. Thanks
I don’t really see how “add a rule to your firewall” can be read as “add a port forward to your router”.
The Chia GUI shows that peers are connecting from various ports to 8444, like 38724/8444. There’s the odd one that shows 8444/8444 but they’re very much in the minority and I think that’s all I saw before I changed the firewall rule. Certainly I saw far fewer peers than I do now.
As I understand the port forward rule, it just tells the router to forward traffic that’s has a destination port 8444 to a specific IP address, regardless of what outgoing port the other end is using. Whereas the firewall looks at the traffic and sees both the source and destination port, so a rule only allowing traffic from port 8444 to port 8444 doesn’t allow through most of the peers that are using a different port as their outgoing port.
Comodo Firewall has a section for Global Rules, which is where I’ve set the rule to allow incoming traffic from any port to port 8444 and a section for Application Rules, which is where I’ve allowed all incoming/outgoing traffic to/from the various Chia components.
Thanks for making this list.
I just added a post on the Reddit Chia forum to cover an important sync issue you do currently include in your list: If Chia crashes or does not shut down correctly ‘Zombie’ Chia process can continue to run alongside a restarted Chia GUI causing conflicts and sync issues. The fix is to completely blow away all Chia processes before restarting the GUI.
More info here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/n31y0v/zombie_chia_processes_causing_syncing_to_fail/
Hi Alex
may be a minor point – fwiw – after making changes to router -it needs to be restarted. That is what made it work me
Hi, I had an issue where the status would be: Not Synced. Nothing was going on. For some reason, the system could no longer write to the the lock file(.__debug.lock) in my C:\Users\\.chia\mainnet\log directory. This was likely due to my not closing the app properly just beforehand.
I discovered that this was the problem by launching it via Powershell. I had changed the logging settings, but the log file was not updating, which is what drove me to launch it via Powershell.
I stopped the Powershell, then I renamed both the lock and log files something else (I probably could have deleted them too).
I then started the GUI version and it started correctly. The sync process began right away.
Do I have to turn off all my non harvester (port 8444) main farmer GUIs in order to not have them overtake the port 8444 harvester? How will the main 8444 computer know about all my plots on the other computers?
On your harvesters, disable UPnP in the config files. That should prevent them from connecting out.