Reports of Windows users losing peers

[james-prysm]

💎 Issue

Background

Opening this as it's nuanced and haven't been wide spread however it does randomly happen to some windows users
where the OS decides to drop all packets from prysm for some reason. This results in a reduced peer count. Root cause is currently unknown but opening this as a tracking issue.

related OffchainLabs/prysm-documentation#891
related #8144

[defeedme]

welp my system worked fine for 3 years and now I lose all peers after about 2 hours, had to setup a schedule task to kill and restart beacon every 2 hours.. solution below!!

[defeedme]

Hi all, it appears the problem was with my Time Sync program (net time) .. I had the sync interval set at 2 hours.. the ntp servers must have been giving bad data or something.. and windows sucks with accurate time to begin with.. So the solution was to use the google time servers and change it to 10 min sync interval.. so far so good!!! 2 days almost perfect!

[james-prysm]

i'll try to add this to the docs

[james-prysm]

closing issue with added docs now

[defeedme]

welp guess i spoke to soon. back to the same problem. it worked for 2-3 days then stopped. I rebooted my router / modem and same thing worked for a day.. I'm really at my wits end. can't understand how when i stop and restart beacon it works for a few hours then stops. its maddening.

[web3dev2023]

Same issue. I have a Windows 10 and a Windows 11 PC. The beacon client running on them loses peers after a few hours. I sync the Windows time every 5 minutes but it does not work.

They had been working fine for months. I guess the issue became prominent since the Dencun upgrade.

[defeedme]

Same issue. I have a Windows 10 and a Windows 11 PC. The beacon client running on them loses peers after a few hours. I sync the Windows time every 5 minutes but it does not work.

They had been working fine for months. I guess the issue became prominent since the Dencun upgrade.

following.. please let me know if you find out anything.. It seems like something they did around December really made it bad for windows users.. I would love to switch to a minority client but just haven't had the time to figure it out..

can you add your comment to this new issue i opened? #13936

thanks!

[web3dev2023]

let me know if you find out anything.. It seems like something they did around December really made it bad for windows users.. I would love to switch to a minority client but just haven't had the time to figure it out..

can you add your comment to this new issue

Yes, I did found a workaround:

• I am now using the lighthouse beacon client and it has no issue in finding peers.

• At the same time geth can find a few peers before losing them and I added them to static peers:

1. First generate a config file: geth.exe --mainnet dumpconfig > geth-config.toml
2. Then edit this file, add your favourite peers to StaticNodes , save it with UTF-8 encoding (I used Notepad++)
3. Finally run geth with the flag --config geth-config.toml