Hello Kris, Since nobody has answered this, I'll take a crack at it.
For your first question, btcwallet requires a btcd chain server to be running somewhere. It doesn't have to be on the same machine as your wallet, but you still need it running somewhere as wallet needs to ask it chain-related questions. So, the short answer is you can't get away without having a copy of the block chain at the moment using btcwallet. The only way you can currently get away without having a copy of the block chain is by using an SPV wallet (btcwallet is NOT an SPV wallet). In that case you don't run any full verification software (such as btcd or bitcoind). In exchange for not running a full node, you give up some security in that you have to trust the portion of the network you are connected to has honest nodes. For your second question, if you connect with btcwallet (or btcd depending on your application's particular needs) via websockets, the performance is much higher than bitcoind because you don't have all of the overhead of constantly creating and tearing HTTP connections for every request. With the websocket interface, you create one connection and the stream of information simply flows asynchronously over the open connection. The websocket interface also provides notifications of various events such as balance changes so you don't have to poll for it like you do with bitcoind. With that out of the way, btcd is extremely stable while btcwallet is still under pretty heavy development. Due to that, we have not yet stress tested btcwallet to find the limits. I have personally tested a few hundred clients against btcd and it handled it with no issues where the same stress test failed against bitcoind (issues with too many connections, responses outside of a timely window, etc). Given that data point, my guess is btcwallet will also handle things over websockets quite well, but as I said previously, we have not tested that. On 5/5/2014 11:30 AM, kris wrote: > Hello, i was considering switching to btcd and wallet instead of > bitcoind for convenience and perhaps not having to host the blockchain. > Is this possible atm? > > I need to communicate with the service using php too, and it has to be > able to be stable with thousands of customers. How is the performance vs > bitcoind and is it feasible to use in such a project now? > > -K
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