How might one stop pruning when started in monerod?

Question

How do I gracefully stop blockchain pruning done by monerod? I have started monerod to update the blockchain and when it finished syncing it I decided to try to save some disk space as the database grew to a lot.

I started pruning by running the prune-blockchain command inside of monerod. Sadly, I later learned that such way of pruning does not do any good for the disk space usage. Now I want to gracefully stop this process in order to not corrupt the existing database.

I have tried from a new shell to do

monerod exit

this indicates that the signal for termination is sent but the deamon keeps running. The shell where monerod is running does not react to any input.

How might I stop pruning gracefully when it was started by prune_blockchain from monerod cli?

Answer 1

One does not. Pruning is a long one shot operation.

If your database is too large, pruning in place will not actually decrease the file size. You will need to resync from scratch with --prune-blockchain for this, which neatly moots your question in the first place :)

Answer 2

Assuming you run the newest version on a Linux 64-bit environment as I do. Also assuming that your paths relative to ~ are the same as mine.

Open a new tab in your bash terminal and run:

~/monero-x86_64-linux-gnu-v0.17.1.9/monerod exit

It works on my PC, yielding:

2021-02-08 14:45:33.770 I Monero 'Oxygen Orion' (v0.17.1.9-release)

Stop signal sent

In order to monitor the latest of your monerod open a separate tab in your Bash terminal and run:

tail -f ~/.bitmonero/bitmonero.log

P.S. It stops my client that was started by ~/monero-x86_64-linux-gnu-v0.17.1.9/monerod --detach`. I've not done any pruning yet.