Troubleshoot validator problems

Use this guide to solve the most common validator problems.

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 palomad process crashes.

To return the voting power back to your validator:

1. If palomad is not running, restart it:

   palomad start
   

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

   palomad tx slashing unjail <Paloma> --chain-id=<chain_id> --from=<from>
   

   • <Paloma> is the address of your validator account.
   • <name> is the name of the validator account. To find this information, run palomad keys list.

   DANGER

   If you don't wait for palomad to sync before running unjail, an error message will inform you that your validator is still jailed.

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

   palomad status
   

   If your voting power is less than it was previously, you may have been slashed for downtime.

palomad crashes because of too many open files

The default number of files Linux can open per process is 1024. palomad is known to open more than this amount, causing the process to crash.

1. Increase the number of open files allowed by running ulimit -n 4096.

2. Restart the process with palomad start.

If you are using systemd or another process manager to launch palomad, you might need to configure them. The following sample systemd file fixes the problem:

# /etc/systemd/system/palomad.service
[Unit]
Description=Paloma Testnet Node
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=ubuntu
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/go/bin/palomad start
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3
LimitNOFILE=4096

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

palomad crashes because of memory fragmentation

Huge memory allocation can cause memory fragmentation issue. Temporal solution is just using small Wasm cache size like 50~100MB.

v0.5.10+:

contract-memory-cache-size = 100

v0.5.7~v0.5.9:

write-vm-memory-cache-size = 100

The validator is not active

• The validator is jailed. To solve this problem, unjail the validator by running:

palomad tx slashing unjail <Paloma> --chain-id=<chain_id> --from=<from>

• The validator is not in the active validator set. Only the top 175 validators are in this set. To fix this problem, increase your total stake to be larger than the 175th validator.