Bitcoin Forum

I often look at the connected node list when I am synchronising my blockchain. Times vary quite a bit depending on the obvious factors, network traffic, quality of the connection, and what I am doing on the computer whilst sync'ing is running in the background. Sometimes it is really slow when I feel it should be faster, and I've been disconnecting from nodes with a 5 digit ping rate. However, I wonder if that is a good policy. I'm starting to suspect that nodes with low 2 digit pings are in demand, and they don't send me much data. Looking at the network histogram, I sometimes get long gaps with no action. Would it be better for me to leave the apparently slower nodes connected? I wonder if they are more likely to talk to me, so I will get a steady flow of data.

Am I correct in my assumption, or is the ping rate not very relevant?

Ping rate shouldn't cause too much of an issue as the actual hard drive, CPU and RAM are the bottlenecks.

I'm not sure if there's a full bootstrap.dat to make it faster to sync. Can you find any other way of getting the data at a faster rate, what's your internet speed on speedtest.net?

High ping doesn't necessarily mean a slower downloading speed.
Low ping (2 digit that you mentioned) doesn't necessarily mean that node is in demand.

Ping is a data packet sent across the internet to a destination and is returned. Then the time for this process is measured and it shows response time. It can also mean your route consisted of a lot of hops and went through a lot of DNS servers.
Think of PING as the way Sonar works. In fact the guy who wrote PING for UNIX is describing it as such. http://ftp.arl.army.mil/mike/ping.html
So the low ping node may have been closer to you on the internet than it is to others. I may see the same node with a higher ping.

AFAIK the way bitcoin core uses ping is mainly to determine whether a node which you were connected to is still online and answering, so that it knows whether to keep the socket open or should it close it.

Perhaps your OS is going into sleep mode automatically and is disabling network activity on the whole system.
I suggest you try running some other program (seeding a torrent maybe) and see if these same periods of inactivity appear.
Maybe you will be able to tweak this in settings of your OS.

Thanks for the replies guys, and I'm starting to think that the problem is with the Windows firewall. Hence my move to Ubuntu.

I tend to use public WiFi, but it doen't look as if this is the problem.

If you would like the original problem solving, what firewall was it? Can you make an exclusion for the app? The Microsoft original software shouldn't affect it too much. (And also to help other users with the same issues).

If not then using a different OS was a good solution in this case.

Thanks for the offer. I ought to look into the problem, but I've got som many issues with Windows, such as their forced upgrades, Cortana, and the like, and I don't like Bill Gates support for world eugenics, tht I probbly will move away from using it. I've got somuch running under Windows though, that it's a preety major project just to move. Moving Bitcoin core onto Ubuntu was pretty painless, and didn't involve much effort. The netbook ( Ubuntu ) is about half the physical size of the notebook, but that isn't really important when running core.

If I start to do some video editing, then I might buy a more powerful notebook machine, and I'll get rid of Windows before I start loading anything onto it.

I planned to do some analysis using wireshark, but I've been hit by the 'flu virus over the last few days, so that had had to go on the shelf for a while.

I'm starting to think that this 2Tb Toshiba external HDD is a bit slow. I've got a 256Gb Samsung SDD, and I might copy the files onto that for evaluation. 256Gb seems a bit small though given the way Bitcoin is expanding at the moment. I haven't checked the current blockchain size, but with all the extra files you need, 256Gb is going run out fairly soon I expect. I'm temped to turn it into a pruned node, and keep the Windows one as an archive.

You could always replace the 2tb internal HDD for a 2tb ssd (I personally don't trust flash technology though)...

Pruning the node can speed it up a bit and cause less issues for the disk used (I was previously considering a 128GB RAM drive but couldn't find a laptop powerful enough to take it, think it'd need a server specialised one). They're also pretty expensive in comparison to a HDD/ssd.

You're going to have to watch out for some stuff not being supported on Linux as they are Windows.
 Personally, I really hate Windows 10 (I'm still on 7 on most of my computers and am hoping Microsoft put the breaks on pulling the operating systems support as it is the best they've made IMO). Also, I do have a forcefully downloaded "Microsoft Virus" on one of those computers with a 2GB file downloaded by Windows Update to kill itself and add Windows 10 before it was possible to bring back the updater... Disappointed.

Yes, switching from Windows to Linux is always the best solution in the end for security and privacy reasons, especially if you are dealing with Bitcoin.
It can be a bit of work for some users, but it is always worth it in the end, at least in my opinion.

@jackg I doubt many users can but 2tb SSD drives and 128GB RAMs :D That is pretty impressive though if you ask me. I have never seen such a beast of a computer in real life.

Depending on what public WiFi you use it might be a small part of the issue.
I do some work for places that give free public WiFi (Some malls, some offices)
Web / HTTP traffic is given a massive priority over other traffic.

Almost all P2P stuff (games / skype / unknown traffic) is dropped to the bottom of the list.
Torrents (if the AP catches them) are throttled to 5k. The person sees good connection through the web but all other traffic is crawling so they blame the other peers.
It's actually a somewhat standard practice. So if the public WiFi you connect to is throttling it can really slow you down.

-Dave

A solution to this is changing the port number to port 80 for bitcoin core (if won't make the connection for others too much slower as they still have to lock communications with the modem while transmitting information anyway).
Generally servers are the only thing that I've seen that have these sorts of specs. A 128gb RAM drive to be fully optimized would in my opinion require several CPUs that'd need to be connected in a specific way for them to all work with each other (unless I cluster them with individual RAM drives).

2tb SSDs are also only around $600-1000 and based on their power it'd be worthwhile (providing they live long enough and may need mirroring every few days though). I was also very interested in a new ssd with 6gbps access speeds and 12tb but the $14000 on a drive was way too far in my opinion.

I use a variety of connections, and I'm starting to get a feel for the problems, and the way to optimise things. I need to do a bit more research though. Sorry to be a bit slow doing this, but I've got interested in my new product brand site, and the possibility of using Steemit to promote it.

Well this is getting interesting. I let the netbook get behind by about 9 days on the SSD, and it's taking less than 4 hours to synchronise. I don't think that is bad goind for a low(ish) spec netbook running over public WiFi with an external drive. I think I'll add a segwit address to the wallet, and I'll use it as my main wallet. I feel more comfortable with the node running under Ubuntu. I'm not sure what to do with the HDD, but it will probably be useful as a backup for my wallet and the blockchain. I don't want to have to download that again. :)

The next stage is probably to claim my Bitcoin Cash, and I'll convert that into Steem to promote the videos that I haven't made yet. :)