BitcoinUnlimited: Pruning regression test failures

I’ve always had trouble executing the pruning.py test successfully. I’m opening this issue to sort them out, and see if others also experience troubles with that test.

To test, one needs to re-enable the test (it is currently Disabled in qa/pull-tester/rpc-tests.py). Change the line which says:

Disabled('pruning', "too much disk"),

to simply read:

'pruning',

and then execute qa/pull-tester/rpc-tests.py pruning

The test takes a long time, which is why is was disabled even though it is already in the ‘extended’ test suite which doesn’t get run automatically in Travis CI.

The failures I got in the past looked like timeout / connection related issues. Yesterday, I tried again based on latest dev branch HEAD, on a Debian 7 x86_64 system. I’ve attached the failure output from the test as a file - the failure is slightly different than I’ve had before - this time an actual assertion in the client was triggered. I will run the same test on release and post results, as well as execute it on an Ubuntu 16.10 VM for both release and dev.

I hope others can also try executing this test on a diverse range of systems, and report on whether it succeeds for them. Best to do it overnight, and remember to either set terminal scrollback to a sufficient length, or run it using script(1) to capture the output or otherwise redirect the output to a file for capturing.

20170426_pruning_fail_on_bu_dev_debian7.txt