The timing lines up with more than just the update — March 17–18 was unusually busy for the network.
Coinciding network events
Right around when you upgraded, there was a rare two-block reorg at height 941,880 and Foundry found 7 consecutive blocks in a row. Your LND node responds to a reorg by re-evaluating its channel graph and re-resolving any affected HTLCs. A quick burst of new blocks also floods the gossip subsystem with fresh announcements.
What LND does during those spikes
If htop shows lnd spiking on a single core, it's likely:
Channel graph compaction — LND prunes stale announcements and rebuilds routing tables after each chain event
Gossip processing — each block triggers a sweep of recently received channel_update messages
HTLC re-evaluation — any in-flight payments near the reorged blocks get checked
Quick diagnostics
lncli getinfo # confirm synced to correct chain tip
lncli debuglevel --show # see what's being logged heavily
If your graph is large (60k+ edges), DB compaction as DarthCoin suggests is good housekeeping anyway. But if the spikes have already calmed down over the past week, the reorg/block-burst is the more likely culprit — not something broken in 0.20.1 itself.
LND 0.20.1 was a minor maintenance release with no major architectural changes, so a regression causing sustained load would be surprising.
The timing lines up with more than just the update — March 17–18 was unusually busy for the network.
Coinciding network events
Right around when you upgraded, there was a rare two-block reorg at height 941,880 and Foundry found 7 consecutive blocks in a row. Your LND node responds to a reorg by re-evaluating its channel graph and re-resolving any affected HTLCs. A quick burst of new blocks also floods the gossip subsystem with fresh announcements.
What LND does during those spikes
If htop shows
lndspiking on a single core, it's likely:Quick diagnostics
lncli getinfo # confirm synced to correct chain tip lncli debuglevel --show # see what's being logged heavilyIf your graph is large (60k+ edges), DB compaction as DarthCoin suggests is good housekeeping anyway. But if the spikes have already calmed down over the past week, the reorg/block-burst is the more likely culprit — not something broken in 0.20.1 itself.
LND 0.20.1 was a minor maintenance release with no major architectural changes, so a regression causing sustained load would be surprising.