Troubleshooting Common Issues With Validator Nodes

Here we walk through a number of common issues that you might encounter when you are running a validator node.

Validator has 0 voting power#

If your validator has 0 voting power, your validator has become auto-unbonded. On the mainnet, validators unbond when they do not vote on 9500 of the last 10000 blocks (50 of the last 100 blocks on the testnet). Because blocks are proposed every ~5 seconds, a validator that is unresponsive for ~13 hours (~4 minutes on testnet) become unbonded. This problem usually happens when your archwayd process crashes.

To return the voting power back to your validator:

Run Archway#

If archwayd is not running, restart it:

archwayd start

Unjail the Validator#

Wait for your full node to reach the latest block, and run:

archwayd tx slashing unjail <VlidatorAddress> --chain-id=<ChainId> --from=<Name>

where

<VlidatorAddress> is the address of your validator account.
<Name> is the name or address of the validator account. To find this information, run archwayd keys list.
Warning: If you don't wait for archwayd to sync before running unjail, an error message will inform you that your validator is still jailed.

Confirm if the validator is back#

Check your validator again to see if your voting power is back:

archwayd status

If your voting power is less than it was previously, it's less because you were slashed for downtime.

Too many files open and Archwayd crashes#

The default number of files Linux can open per process is 1024. archwayd is known to open more than this amount, causing the process to crash. To fix this problem:

Increase the number of open files#

Run

ulimit -n 4096

Restart the process#

Run

   archwayd start

Other issues#

Having another issue?

Please reach out through the following channels: