Electrum Server (electrs) installed but not connecting to Bitcoin Core

Support and Troubleshooting
#1

My bitcoin node appears to be up and running (lightning wallets have no problem connecting to it), but my Electrum server shows it’s status as “Running” and “Waiting for Bitcoin Node to finish syncing…”.

I am also seeing higher CPU usage than I expected given my hardware, but given that I am new to this I’m not sure there is anything abnormal there.

Is what I’m seeing normal behavior? Does Electrum Server take a while to index or do some other operation? I installed electrs after my bitcoin node was fully synced.

Thank you!

#2

Same here.

I tried to reboot a few times, didn’t help.

What I am trying now (and seems to work) is I uninstalled Electrum Server, then installed it again. Where it used to say “Waiting for Bitcoin Node to finish syncing…” it now shows a progress bar and says “x% synchronized”. Now at 30% after about 1h.

#3

Electrum is a large database of sorted UTXOs, needs RAM and high disk speed access time to be something fast.

Mempool app not usable anymore
#4

I have the same issue, turns out it Tor is way too slow here for me, so I’m just not using Electrs anymore. My only case for the Electrs was to connect Sparrow, but I can do that directly in Bitcoin Core, even so, doing this via Tor wasn’t work nice, takes a long time to just connect and sometimes not even connects, so I allowed local connections in the Bitcoin Core, and things went really fast and smooth.

After that I decided to take Fulcrum for a spin (installed on my desktop using initially the Bitcoin Core in my desktop too) and it is awesome, very fast, reliable and eficient. To sync took about 8 hours with some fine tunigs in the process, and when I connected Sparrow took only 2 secs to sync my wallet. After that I transfered the database files to a HD (the sync was made in a NVMe) and connected Fulcrum to Bitcoin Core in the Umbrel. All went fine.

So, maybe the nice guys from Umbrel may delivery Fulcrum in the next version, so we will have an option, Fulcrum even showed up in the Umbrel 0.5.0 announcement blog post. Who knows…

Another advantage (at least for me) is that I will just copy the already sync database to Umbrel and skip all the sync time consuming step just like I did with the blockchain.

1 Like
#5

Interesting to hear. Thanks for the confirmation everyone! It looks like it is fully synchronized now and CPU usage has dropped significantly on my machine.

It was a bit of a shock to see that still synchronizing this morning given that I had installed the previous night. I don’t know that I ever saw a progress bar, which would have been helpful to know that something was actually happening. Maybe tor was the bottle next, but I’m still not sure that explains the 50% CPU load for such a long period

#6

The CPU can be explained by the process of sync where Electrs indexes each UTXO of each block to make a database which is fast to consult, so wallets can sync faster than connect directly to core. After that process finishes, Electrs is quite light, no stress in CPU at all, even with various wallet plugged into it.

My case here was bad, my node after two and a half days didn’t sync yet, not even close. My Internet is of 700Mbps…

1 Like
#7

always wait 24 hours , i guess you synched your node not a while ago .

1 Like
#8

I think it was almost exactly 24 hours between my bitcoin node being fully synced and starting the electrum server install. Took probably 12-14 hours for electrum to be fully synced. Honestly, the only issue was really that the electrum server interface was not descriptive at all during the initialization - I would have thought nothing of it if the progress bar was moving or the message said something besides “Waiting for Bitcoin Node to finish syncing”. It’s working great now, just thought it was hung up like I’ve had with another app (Pi-Hole).

#9

pi hole could be messy with umbrel apps.

#10

Hi guys, just checking to see if you ended up managing to get Electrs to work?
I’m on Umbrel v0.5.1 and only have Bitcoin and Electrs. After syncing till around 50%, electrs seems to always stall there. From that point, it reverts to " Waiting for Bitcoin Node to finish syncing" even through I finished syncing Bitcoin Node before I even installed Electrs.

Tried uninstalling and reinstalling the whole lot, but same result.
The real goal is to have Blue wallet and Sparrow connect to it, but both wallets can’t seem to connect.
Wondering if anyone has any tips to help me move forward?

*no issues in the Umbrel logs that I can see.
** Strangely, docker-compose logs electrs gives me:

ERROR: No such service: electrs

Although, I can see it running in the Umbrel logs.

#11

I just waited :man_shrugging: Took about a day for me and it started working. Good luck!

#12

Dang, alright lucky you haha.
I’ll keep going.

1 Like
#13

I also see this error message when I run docker-compose logs electrs: No such service: electrs

I have never seen any movement on the progress meter, stuck at 0%

How can I verify whether electrs is able to talk to bitcoincore?

Edit: after further searching, I think this thread here is exactly the same issue I’m describing. Maybe it’s best I reply over there.

#14

I also see the error message when I run docker-compose logs electrs: No such service: electr
What does that mean?

#15

I’m having a similar issue. Ran electrs after my node was fully synced. 12-16 hrs it showed 100% synchronized. I tried to connect my node to sparrow, but Tor connection wasn’t getting established. I restarted my Umbrel and now Electrs shows “waiting for bitcoin node to finish syncing” with no progress bar. Not sure why this would take so long if it already previously synced.