bitcoind crashing due to insufficient memory? EDIT 3

Bumping my VPS to 1GB of physical RAM stopped the crashing issue... UNTIL said VPS ran out of disc space.

I added prune=10240 to my ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf file such that the blockchain file would start pruning transaction history upon reaching 10GB filesize (1024 MB * 10 = 10GB).

EDIT 2

This seems to be a memory issue, not a VPN networking issue. I turned OpenVPN off and restarted bitcoind only to see it silently crash again.

I've now added a 1GB swapfile to expand the available memory space (risk is this will cause performance issues for the OS). Will update once again if this solves the issue. If not, I will probably end up trying to upgrade the VPS instance to 1GB of physical RAM from 512MB.



EDIT
Found some interesting stuff in the log relating to tor...


root@sf-vps:~# cat ~/.bitcoin/debug.log | grep tor -i
2016-11-13 16:52:21 Default data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 16:52:21 Using data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 16:52:21 Using at most 125 connections (1024 file descriptors available)
2016-11-13 16:52:29 torcontrol thread start
2016-11-13 17:08:43 Default data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 17:08:43 Using data directory /root/.bitcoin
2016-11-13 17:08:43 Using at most 125 connections (1024 file descriptors available)
2016-11-13 17:08:50 torcontrol thread start
2016-11-13 17:08:50 tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
2016-11-13 17:08:50 tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect
2016-11-13 17:08:51 tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
2016-11-13 17:08:51 tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect
2016-11-13 17:08:52 tor: Error connecting to Tor control socket
2016-11-13 17:08:52 tor: Not connected to Tor control port 127.0.0.1:9051, trying to reconnect




I've installed the Bitcoin software on Ubuntu 16.04. I'm able to run bitcoind -daemon for a few minutes, but after a while the process crashes. 

Interestingly, I don't see any reasons in ~/.bitcoin/debug.log explaining why the program might have terminated.

I suspect a couple of things:


Not enough disc space to store the entire blockchain. However, I don't think this is the case as running df - h shows a combined total of only ~41% disc consumption:



root@sf-vps:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            241M     0  241M   0% /dev
tmpfs            50M  3.1M   47M   7% /run
/dev/vda1        20G  6.3G   13G  34% /
tmpfs           247M     0  247M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           247M     0  247M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs            50M     0   50M   0% /run/user/0



Server is not able to receive inbound messages as I'm running a VPN. Is it possible that I'm experiencing a networking issue, e.g. inbound traffic to port 8333 (the default for bitcoind) is not being allowed through my VPN? I can't remember how to change the VPN config to allow connections on specific ports, but that's where I'm looking next...



root@sf-vps:~# netstat -nr
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags   MSS Window  irtt Iface
0.0.0.0         159.203.240.1   0.0.0.0         UG        0 0          0 eth0
10.8.0.0        10.8.0.2        255.255.255.0   UG        0 0          0 tun0
10.8.0.2        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.255 UH        0 0          0 tun0
10.12.0.0       0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U         0 0          0 eth0
159.203.240.0   0.0.0.0         255.255.240.0   U         0 0          0 eth0

Thanks in advance for your help :)
Are you sure 9051 is the right port for tor? 9050 is the default port.
You can check it by using sudo netstat -plnt | grep ':9051'.

And is the tor service active?

When it still doesn't works try disabling selinux(If you are running linux). I had some problems with tor because selinux was blocking it. But don't forget to put it back on. If it is selinux you can make a rule for tor/bitcoin in selinux.