Bitcoin Forum

Hi!

I think Bitcoin is very innovative!
Since I installed the Windows client and started generating keys, I have continuous hard disk usage?
I admit I have on 1 GB of memory, and it is completely in use.
Is the Bitcoin client highly memory intensive, or does it store a lot of data?

Thanks for considering this issue, which may become a barrier to utilization for me at some point.

Thanks for your perspective,

Michael

If your downloaded block count is not up to the networks current value (roughly 67,000 right now, a new one every 7 minutes), then your client is still downloading and verifying blocks. That takes a little hard drive each time it seems. Once it is caught up that little bit of hard drive usage would be only every 7 minutes.
It is not memory intensive and currently the database takes only 58 megabytes after being a year old now I believe.

Even with having most of the blocks the hard drive usage seems a little inefficient.

I've had my client offline for several days and just started it. It already had over 69,000 blocks and yet the hard drive was grinding for 2+ minutes solid before the counter started going up. (I even installed version 0.3.2.5 hoping the cached database stuff Satoshi added would help.)

Clearly the initial startup is doing some sort of block (re)verification for all blocks that is causing some synchronous reads and/or writes.

Yes, and the next release will speed that many times over, I've tested both the Windows and Linux client, major speed increase on block updates in them.