Bitcoin Forum

Hi all!

Im using bitcoin core Qt 0.18.0 on windows 10 i7 16GB server.

below, my bitcoin.conf:
blocksonly=1
par=-1
dbcache=16000
peertimeout=10
plus a list of addnodes...

despite everything, sync is very slow. To synchronize the last 20/30 hours, I spend a lot of time.
How can I lower the synchronization time?
any advice is welcome!

You should proabably move this to
Bitcoin Forum > Bitcoin > Bitcoin Technical Support    here -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=4.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=4.0)
With that being said.

SSD or spinning drive? Old slow drives will drive up initial sync time. Crappy RAID setup will make it worse too. [been there...done that]

What gen i7 the original ones are over 10 years old. IT's n

Internet connection speed? You are going to have to download over 250 GB of data.

-Dave

@ moderator.
If this thread is in wrong child board, feel free to move it.

@ dave
I7 it's a generation 7. 4 cores, 8 threads,
The HD it's an 8tb spinning drive.
Internet connection is a standard 20mb.

Seems my config is not scaling the pc capacity.
Using task manager, I can see network usage is very low. Cpu usage it's really low. Disk usage it's high, but read/write are just 1 or 2 mb/sec. The HD perfo are highest., so, seems is not the bottlenek. .

Any idea?

Keep in mind that 1-2 MB/s read/write speed is random read/write speed, not sequential read/write speed (usually about 100-200MB/s for HDD). Bitcoin sync and most computing tasks uses random read/write speed.
Your HDD clearly is the bottleneck.

If you have SSD with low capacity, you could move chainstate file to SSD which could improve the performance significantly.
SEe https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Splitting_the_data_directory (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Splitting_the_data_directory)

Seems this tip make me the day!!!
I have a ssd with no space for the blockchain data but with enough spase for the chains tate data.
I will try for sure to move it to ssd.
I will update this thread to help guys who have my issue!

That's your entire RAM, you should probably lower it.

That's what I do, it took me just a (full) day to download on my old i3 laptop running Linux. I set dbcache to 4096 for it, and leave the rest for normal Linux kernal file cache.

Mostly what the above people have said.
Also, important to note about drive performance is use the proper / newer chipset drivers.
Windows will by default install a base set of drivers that work. Usually Intel has better drivers on their site.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-improve-pc-performance-by-fixing-the-intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver/ (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-improve-pc-performance-by-fixing-the-intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver/)

-Dave

When I come back at home I will check this too.
Seems some drivers are really old, despite the latest  windows 10 massive update was done just few weeks ago!

i can confirm this fix my issue.
opened bitcoin core wallet right now, after chainstate was moved to a ssd disk and created simbolic link.
result: i update my local blockchain, 2 days old, in 3 minutes!
it's awesome!!!
thank you very much ETFbitcoin !
i give you 10 merits for the help!

Why 0.18.0, 0.18.1 is already out. The splitting the data directory is a useful tip, I might try that too. I still store the whole thing on a spinning platter.

The huge improvement in startup time alone is worth putting chainstate on SSD :)

Trust me.
I have done the test today.
The improvement it's really tangible.
Then I test if all is OK pushing a transaction and all works fine!
Sync bitcoin blockchain issue will be just a bad memory.