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Title: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: bbulker on May 04, 2011, 10:22:55 AM I've had Bitcoin open for over 48 hours and it is downloading the blocks extremely slow (currently at 86k). My download speed is >2MB/s. Is there any way to speed this up? At this rate it won't be downloaded for another 3 days.
Title: Re: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: bbulker on May 05, 2011, 12:25:55 AM This is really bugging me, I won't be able to use my wallet for quite some time.
Title: Re: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: MoonShadow on May 05, 2011, 12:45:01 AM The client downloads the old blockchain in sets of 500 blocks each, and then proceeds to hash-check everything in each of those blocks before proceeding to the next set. So it's not neccessarily the speed of your Internet connection that is the limiting factor. Are you using an old machine?
Title: Re: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: bbulker on May 05, 2011, 02:19:54 AM I'm on a quad core 3.5 GHz with 8 GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM.
Does verification require a lot of disk I/O? I am running it on a flash drive that gets around 5 MB/s transfer rates. Title: Re: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: MoonShadow on May 05, 2011, 03:42:41 AM Does verification require a lot of disk I/O? I am running it on a flash drive that gets around 5 MB/s transfer rates. Yes, the initial hash-checking of the blockchain is also building a local database file that your client uses in the future to quickly find older transactions. This takes massive amounts of disk I/O. It would be better to bootstrap onto a regular hard disk and then copy the resulting database file and wallet.dat file to a new instance on a flash drive if you are looking to make it portable. Ongoing updates are not as bad, but could still take a while over USB. Title: Re: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: gigabytecoin on May 06, 2011, 07:51:54 PM Does verification require a lot of disk I/O? I am running it on a flash drive that gets around 5 MB/s transfer rates. Yes, the initial hash-checking of the blockchain is also building a local database file that your client uses in the future to quickly find older transactions. This takes massive amounts of disk I/O. It would be better to bootstrap onto a regular hard disk and then copy the resulting database file and wallet.dat file to a new instance on a flash drive if you are looking to make it portable. Ongoing updates are not as bad, but could still take a while over USB. Yes it could easily be your flash drive's transfer speed that is your bottle neck. Try grabbing one of these babies. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220253&cm_re=patriot_boost-_-20-220-253-_-Product) They are about 6 times faster than your current usb drive, and for $25 you can't go wrong. Title: Re: Blocks downloading very slow Post by: Cdecker on May 06, 2011, 09:43:13 PM If you are tech savvy you could create a ram-disc, copy the datadir to it and then start the client against it. This works especially well when you download a snapshot from one of the HTTP mirrors :)
Once your client has caught up you can stop the client, copy the updated datadir to the original datadir. HTH, cdecker |