test: set number of RPC server threads to 2
What the developer wrote
Authored by furszy
test: set number of RPC server threads to 2
The default `-rpcthreads` value spawns 16 HTTP server threads for each node.
Running the functional test suite with default `rpcthreads` can exhaust file
descriptors or hit other resource limits very easily.
Moreover, having 16 threads is unnecessary since they are mostly idle. We
run RPC calls on a single RPC connection and wait for it result synchronously.
There is (almost) never two RPC calls occurring concurrently.
Because of this, the threads are mostly idle, so we can safely limit the number
of them to two.
What changed, and why it matters
This change only affects Bitcoin Core's internal functional test suite. It reduces the number of RPC server threads spawned by test nodes from 16 to 2 to avoid running out of file descriptors and other resources during automated testing. It does not change production node behavior and is not a security fix.
No security action needed. This is a benign test-framework configuration tweak.
Security signals we found
No strong security signals were identified.
Evidence from the diff
The commit adds rpcthreads=2 to the generated bitcoin.conf for functional test nodes in test/functional/test_framework/util.py. The default rpcthreads=16 caused test runs to exhaust file descriptors or hit resource limits because each test node spawns 16 HTTP threads. Since the test framework uses a single synchronous RPC connection per node, most threads were idle. This is a test infrastructure resource optimization, not a code change to consensus, networking, wallet, or RPC security semantics.
Changed components
test/functional/test_framework/util.pyInspect captured patch +1 / −0
diff --git a/test/functional/test_framework/util.py b/test/functional/test_framework/util.py
index da90e374..d7ffed87 100644
--- a/test/functional/test_framework/util.py
+++ b/test/functional/test_framework/util.py
@@ -444,6 +444,7 @@ def write_config(config_path, *, n, chain, extra_config="", disable_autoconnect=
# Disable server-side timeouts to avoid intermittent issues
f.write("rpcservertimeout=99000\n")
f.write("rpcdoccheck=1\n")
+ f.write("rpcthreads=2\n")
f.write("fallbackfee=0.0002\n")
f.write("server=1\n")
f.write("keypool=1\n")
Why this scored 15/100
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