# Splice-validator-participant-1 keeps restarting during reconnect-participants on mainnet (v0.5.18)
**URL:** https://forum.canton.network/t/splice-validator-participant-1-keeps-restarting-during-reconnect-participants-on-mainnet-v0-5-18/8624
**Category:** App Development
**Created:** [May 6, 2026, 1:44pm UTC](https://forum.canton.network/t/splice-validator-participant-1-keeps-restarting-during-reconnect-participants-on-mainnet-v0-5-18/8624 "2026-05-06T13:44:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@lixiubao](https://forum.canton.network/u/lixiubao)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2026, 1:44pm UTC](https://forum.canton.network/t/splice-validator-participant-1-keeps-restarting-during-reconnect-participants-on-mainnet-v0-5-18/8624/1 "2026-05-06T13:44:39Z")
We’re running a Canton validator node (v0.5.18) on mainnet and the splice-validator-participant-1 container keeps restarting in a loop.
Observed behavior:
- Participant starts and connects to 13 sequencers successfully
- Gets stuck on Task reconnect-participants still not completed
- CPU spikes to ~785% (nearly maxing all 8 cores), RSS grows to ~4.3 GB
- Participant crashes ~6 minutes after startup with no ERROR-level logs
- Validator loses its gRPC connection to participant:5002 and also restarts
- Cycle repeats
Server spec: 8 vCPU / 16 GB RAM, 100 GB data disk. Memory and disk are not the bottleneck.
Is this expected behavior during the initial ACS sync on mainnet? Does the reconnect-participants task eventually complete after enough retry cycles, or is there something we need to configure to stabilize the
participant?
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### Author:  [@Jatin\_Pandya\_cf](https://forum.canton.network/u/Jatin_Pandya_cf)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2026, 8:21am UTC](https://forum.canton.network/t/splice-validator-participant-1-keeps-restarting-during-reconnect-participants-on-mainnet-v0-5-18/8624/2 "2026-05-07T08:21:22Z")
The `reconnect-participants` task is the participant’s internal task that reestablishes its connections to the synchronizer’s sequencer connections after a restart, task stalls when the participant is under extreme resource pressure during the initial ACS commitment reconciliation process. crash at ~6 minutes with no ERROR logs seems a JVM out of memory kill which explains why you see nothing in the application logs.
I’d suggest a few things to try:
- Increase the participant JVM heap as in add explicit heap flags to the participant container via `_JAVA_OPTIONS` in your Docker Compose.
- High CPU usage is the JVM’s parallel GC threads competing with each other so capping container CPU to like 6 cores forces the JVM to use fewer GC threads and often results in _faster_ overall startup because GC becomes less chaotic.
- ACS commitment processing is also db heavy so if Postgres is on the same 100 GB data disk with standard IOPS it can become a bottleneck that backs up the participant’s memory queues.
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### Author:  [@lixiubao](https://forum.canton.network/u/lixiubao)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 2:04am UTC](https://forum.canton.network/t/splice-validator-participant-1-keeps-restarting-during-reconnect-participants-on-mainnet-v0-5-18/8624/3 "2026-06-09T02:04:46Z")
Thank you