Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin-Qt version 0.8.0 is now available from:
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.0/

This is a major release designed to improve performance and handle the
increasing volume of transactions on the network.

Please report bugs using the issue tracker at github:
  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues

How to Upgrade
--------------

If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait
until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older
versions), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over
/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

The first time you run after the upgrade a re-indexing process will be
started that will take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours,
depending on the speed of your machine.

Incompatible Changes
--------------------

This release no longer maintains a full index of historical transaction ids
by default, so looking up an arbitrary transaction using the getrawtransaction
RPC call will not work. If you need that functionality, you must run once
with -txindex=1 -reindex=1 to rebuild block-chain indices (see below for more
details).

Improvements
------------

Mac and Windows binaries are signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin
Foundation, to be compatible with the new security features in OSX 10.8 and
Windows 8.

LevelDB, a fast, open-source, non-relational database from Google, is
now used to store transaction and block indices.  LevelDB works much better
on machines with slow I/O and is faster in general. Berkeley DB is now only
used for the wallet.dat file (public and private wallet keys and transactions
relevant to you).

Pieter Wuille implemented many optimizations to the way transactions are
verified, so a running, synchronized node uses less working memory and does
much less I/O. He also implemented parallel signature checking, so if you
have a multi-CPU machine all CPUs will be used to verify transactions.

New Features
------------

"Bloom filter" support in the network protocol for sending only relevant transactions to
lightweight clients.

contrib/verifysfbinaries is a shell-script to verify that the binary downloads
at sourceforge have not been tampered with. If you are able, you can help make
everybody's downloads more secure by running this occasionally to check PGP
signatures against download file checksums.

contrib/spendfrom is a python-language command-line utility that demonstrates
how to use the "raw transactions" JSON-RPC api to send coins received from particular
addresses (also known as "coin control").

New/changed settings (command-line or bitcoin.conf file)
--------------------------------------------------------

dbcache : controls LevelDB memory usage.

par : controls how many threads to use to validate transactions. Defaults to the number
of CPUs on your machine, use -par=1 to limit to a single CPU.

txindex : maintains an extra index of old, spent transaction ids so they will be found
by the getrawtransaction JSON-RPC method.

reindex : rebuild block and transaction indices from the downloaded block data.

New JSON-RPC API Features
-------------------------

lockunspent / listlockunspent allow locking transaction outputs for a period of time so
they will not be spent by other processes that might be accessing the same wallet.

addnode / getaddednodeinfo methods, to connect to specific peers without restarting.

importprivkey now takes an optional boolean parameter (default true) to control whether
or not to rescan the blockchain for transactions after importing a new private key.

Important Bug Fixes
-------------------

Privacy leak: the position of the "change" output in most transactions was not being
properly randomized, making network analysis of the transaction graph to identify
users' wallets easier.

Zero-confirmation transaction vulnerability: accepting zero-confirmation transactions
(transactions that have not yet been included in a block) from somebody you do not
trust is still not recommended, because there will always be ways for attackers to
double-spend zero-confirmation transactions. However, this release includes a bug
fix that makes it a little bit more difficult for attackers to double-spend a
certain type ("lockTime in the future") of zero-confirmation transaction.

Dependency Changes
------------------

Qt 4.8.3 (compiling against older versions of Qt 4 should continue to work)


Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release:
----------------------------------------------------

Alexander Kjeldaas
Andrey Alekseenko
Arnav Singh
Christian von Roques
Eric Lombrozo
Forrest Voight
Gavin Andresen
Gregory Maxwell
Jeff Garzik
Luke Dashjr
Matt Corallo
Mike Cassano
Mike Hearn
Peter Todd
Philip Kaufmann
Pieter Wuille
Richard Schwab
Robert Backhaus
Rune K. Svendsen
Sergio Demian Lerner
Wladimir J. van der Laan
burger2
default
fanquake
grimd34th
justmoon
redshark1802
tucenaber
xanatos

Hi Gavin,

tried installing bitcoin-0.8.0-win32-setup and got the following error msg:

"Error opening file for writing:

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe

Click Abort to stop the installation,
Retry to try again, or
Ignore to skip this file."

Edit: Windows 7-Pro, 32-bit

That means you still have the old version running

Excellent!

A major thank you to all the devs for your continued hard work.

Are there any differences from RC1?

Thanks a lot guys!

Could you give us links to show us the rationale behind the choice of levelDB over BerkeleyDB?  Have you considered other NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Redis,...)?

Finally, thank you guys.

And right on time to the press attention Bitcoin currently receives.

Are there any changes made from the release candidate, or can I just keep it running?

Does 0.8 take up the same amount of disk space as earlier versions?

If no, do I need to manually delete old blockchain files to regain the space?

Yes. Though you can delete blkindex.dat to free up a bit of space.

Kudos to Gavin & the team for releasing 0.8, an important upgrade to help the network handle the increased load.
Keep up the good work!

If you want to support them, make sure to become members of the Bitcoin Foundation - your contributions go to paying Gavin's salary, and in the future might sponsor additions to the core team (all of which are currently working without pay to my knowledge).

These are full featured databases that require a daemon running in the background. All you need is an embedded KV store.

Thanks to all involved bitcoin devs on this release!

you guys are my code heroes.

Yay finally

Ubuntu/Pinguy 12.04

Replaced the bitcoind/bitcoin-qt with the updated version, launched QT and received an error regarding the database. Sorry, I should have captured the text from the error.. It instructed me to backup the ./bitcoin directory, delete everything except for wallet.dat and run again. I did this, and am now downloading the entire block chain again? On the plus side, it does appear to be processing it much faster then the last time I had to do a full refresh.

Here is what was stored in debug.log if it's of any use. Not sure if this is a bug or if I did something wrong here.


Edit to add db.log

+1 awesome work people

Has something changed from RC1?

Amazing! This loads WAY faster! Took 50 minutes for me compared to the ~8 hours (or whatever it was) it used to take!

8 cores, chugging along getting them blocks  ;D
https://i.imgur.com/TYmHX11.png

Thanks devs!

---

Note to windows users:

Don't panic... Disk usage might look strange during the upgrade from 0.7.2 to 0.8...

There is a "reindexing" step which does interesting and unspecific technical things (hardlinks and other ... things) to convert to the new blockchain DB format...

It burned my iops earlier, now it burning CPU lol

But... kinda 4x time faster.

bitcoin.org needs to be updated; the version on the site is 0.7.2

You've added your grain of sand towards making the world a better, freer place.

Well done, thanks all!

Network upgrade status (http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/branches.html)

If I have the release candidate installed should I update it as well? Is there a difference to the actual release?

Nice work. Amazing speed. Reindexing took only ~ 1 hour on win7x64/Intel i7-2600.

For something as serious as Bitcoin, I would assume no (important) changes between final RC and release. I haven't verified, however.

Just upgraded from rc1. Working great so far on Windows 8.

No PPA yet....

I'm running it, watching the progress with:


It looks amazingly fast.

Do I need to update if I'm already running 0.8 rc1?

"Mac and Windows binaries are signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin
Foundation, to be compatible with the new security features in OSX 10.8 and
Windows 8."

Can somebody explain this please?

I don't think Windows 8 changes much actually, as it's not a Metro app, but the latest versions of MacOS X refuse to run unsigned code unless you go into settings and disable GateKeeper. Obviously, we don't want the instructions for running Bitcoin to involve disabling security systems, which is why the Foundation is now signing the binaries. If somebody tried to ship a fake Bitcoin that was actually a wallet stealer, it wouldn't be signed and GateKeeper would refuse to run it.

This sort of thing is obviously quite dangerous given Apples track record with the iPhone, but at least for now in its current form, GateKeeper does actually make people safer.

Upgraded no probs but left with a 14.5 gig file, took about 1 1/2hr. I have been on wireless for the last two years due to remoteness, upgraded ver as soon as they came out.
So as much as i hate it i have been a major leach on the system but thats about to change thanks to BTC I can get out of my shipping container into a new house.
Is there anyway to throttle how much bandwidth the client uses but stay online to seed something not full throttle all of the time?
Win7, 64bit
AMD Cpu 4core.
ATI 6950

peer bandwidth now seems to be the biggest bottleneck

testing on a windows 2008 server VM (1gb ram/8cpus that i get to use what is not in use by others/50mbit sec dedicated)

4 hours 20 minutes in 13800 blocks remaining


any ideas for downloading multiple blocks at a time from multiple peers?
say its on block 10000 and you are connected to 8 peers...why not download the next 8 one from each peer?

and seems i got stuck on a very slow peer for several blocks? (sub 1kb/sec)

sorry if there is logic like this already going on just ideas


going to let this windows vm finish syncing then delete it and switch over to Ubuntu and do the same. i have 50mbit/sec dedicated uploaded sitting around doing nothing. will put it on a dedicated ip and suggest it around to new users syncing

A couple people asked if they need to upgrade if they are running rc1:  no, I wouldn't bother.

The only significant code change is better handling of the rare case of one of the leveldb database files being corrupted. If you're really curious, github will show you the differences between any two versions; here are the rc1 to 0.8.0 final release differences:  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/v0.8.0rc1...v0.8.0

As a companion release, the Bitcoin blockchain data torrent (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0) has been updated.

This torrent gives you a "bootstrap.dat" file.  If you are initializing a bitcoin client for the first time, drop bootstrap.dat into $DATADIR (your bitcoin data directory), and the bitcoin client will import all the block/transaction data found in that file.

P.S.  Long-term seeders are requested and welcome!  See thread linked above for details.

Just added it to my seedbox and will let it go until a newer version is released.

Just downloaded and used A+ !!!,

Want to say thank you to everyone who takes the time to develop the bitcoin clients!, every update gets better and better and you guys are only doing great things for the community,

Best wishes to you and yours and again thank you for your hard work although some may not express it often there are many out there who appreciate everything you all are doing!.

Cheers!

Does anyone know when the Ubuntu PPA will be updated?

Wow, so my datadir went from ~7GB to ~13.5GB.

Is there any of this that is deprecated and can be pruned? I regularly backup the entire datadir and having it double in size in one day as opposed to over a couple of years is kind of harsh.

It doubled because the old blockchain is still there?

well, I seriously doubt that there is a new blockchain, lol
also it didn't run long enough to download a duplicate, it just reindexed
surely some of this can be deleted but I am unsure what is safe to delete.

You can remove blk0001.dat, blk0002.dat, blk0003.dat and blkindex.dat from the data directory after a reindex is complete and you are caught up with the blockchain (and you don't plan on going back to an older version). Only blkindex should actually be using disk space, as the old BLK000x data are moved upon upgrade, and the blk000x.dat files you see there are hardlinks (shortcuts) on any filesystem that supports hardlinking.

Correct.

Technically, you don't even need to wait for the reindex to complete (as reindexing uses the block files in blocks/blk* to build chainstate and blocks/index).

As a benchmark for those who are interested, I installed 0.8.0 on a 5 year old 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 256 MB graphics processor running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5.  The total synchronization time starting on 2013-02-19 was 22 hours, and the total disk space used is 6.4 GB

Disk usage:

I am using Windows XP SP3.

H:\Bitcoin>dir
 Volume in drive Q is BITCOIN
 Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX

 Directory of Q:\Bitcoin

2013-02-21  09:31 AM    <DIR>          .
2013-02-21  09:31 AM    <DIR>          ..
2012-09-18  10:19 AM                 0 .lock
2012-09-18  13:57 PM         3,850,240 addr.dat
2012-09-27  12:05 PM           131,072 backup.dat
2012-09-18  13:25 PM     2,097,384,811 blk0001.dat
2013-01-04  10:34 AM     2,097,346,788 blk0002.dat
2013-02-20  22:13 PM     1,561,011,203 blk0003.dat
2013-02-20  22:18 PM     1,809,104,896 blkindex.dat
2013-02-20  22:28 PM    <DIR>          blocks
2013-02-21  09:22 AM    <DIR>          chainstate
2013-02-20  22:18 PM    <DIR>          database
2012-09-24  08:41 AM                 0 db.log
2013-02-21  08:31 AM           564,356 debug.log
2013-02-21  09:31 AM           956,384 peers.dat
2013-02-21  09:18 AM           172,032 wallet.dat

What can I safely delete? I highlighted in bold and color what I think can be deleted. Can someone confirm this?

Yes there were some small changes.

I would ask the PPA maintainer.

I've had major problems with this release on my 2nd computer. It's a 5 year old laptop with Windows Vista.

On the first reindex both the blockchain and the wallet got corrupted. On the first sync from nothing (I deleted the blockchain) the blockchain got corrupted. On the second sync from nothing I get this message that the transactions I'm seeing might not be valid, and that either me or the other nodes need to upgrade. It got stuck in 3354 blocks left. In the debug log it says something about an invalid chain.

I don't really know what to do other than stop running Bitcoin-Qt with this PC. I've had no other issues with the computer so it's kinda strange. The 0.7 version worked great as well.

Running well on Mac OS X 10.8.2 but the context menu entries when right-clicking on the Dock-item are gone for whatever reason.

Wow people upgrade fast >71% of the network are running 0.7.x.. I'm still running at 0.6.3, may be time to upgrade to 0.7.x (I don't like running just released version for something that manages my money :P)

That's why I make multiple backups when I upgrade. I mean, I trust the devs... but...  ;D

Same thing here. If you click on "close window", then you are unable to open it again. You close the window, you have to quit the client and restart.

In the old version, if you closed the window you could open it again just right clicking on the Dock-item and selecting "send bitcoins", "receive bitcoins" or whatever you wished to do.

Another question: I see that now the client recommends a transaction fee of 0,01 per KB. That's quite an increase compared to the prior "recommended fee", which was 0,0005 if I my memory is not failing. What do you think about this? Personally I will set up the client that way, I like miners getting fair rewards for processing transactions.

Now a "n00b" question: is there a quick way to calculate how many kb will have your transaction?

Unfotunately no.  There isn't even a way to configure the coin selection routine to optimize for minimum fee for the current transaction vs. maximum efficiency in consolidating small outputs.

i don't see it in the PPA

If you know how many inputs and outputs your transaction will have, then yes:
  http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3011/659

Else no.

nice!

took about 45 minutes on my win7x64/intel 3570k@4.4/8 gig/intel G2 SSD to resync the blockchain.

all in all, a pretty painless upgrade.

thank you.

EDIT: corrected the time.

I've noticed that lately, 90% of the transactions I've sent have been through the raw-tx api. You have full control over fees, outputs, change, etc.

Great work guys, can't say how grateful I am for the work you're doing. I have a question though:


I assume this means only transactions sent from 0.8.0? So that an attacker can just keep using the older version for his purposes, regardless of if the receiver has the latest version. Not saying that it still isn't a very important fix to have for the future.

Also, yesterday I saw some very quick confirmations on a lot of transactions, even no-fee transactions were generally confirmed in less than 10 minutes, which is very good for business. Does that have something to do with this update or is it just a coincidence?

Nice job on 0.8.0 guise.... Everything is super quick -- LOVE IT!

What are all the sst files for? Also you might want to post what can be cleaned up after the install since the install does not do it. Also during install it would be nice if you could let the user specify the datadir rather than using a command line flag.

Just a coincidence.  ASIC miners are rapidly coming online, which increases block production until difficulty changes to compensate.

You can safely delete those that you highlighted. As the new files is in the "blocks" directory.

Easiest way for you to check is to close the bitcoin client, move those files to another directory and then start the client again and check if it starts downloading the blockchain again.

Too bad bitcoin-qt can't use your GPU to accelerate re-indexing the block chain.  It's already using multiple CPU cores if they're available.

Working nicely on Windows 8... where is the PPA for some Linux love?

0.8.0 is great. Thanks to all the developers!!

Much faster when catching up with the blockchain.

What is causing this ? I'm having a hard time to get 0.8.0 up to date. Win7 32. 2 PCs, same troubles. 0.7.2 was working flawless.

Your problem seems almost identical to what I'm experiencing on my second PC. The computer itself works quite fine but I've still been completely unable to get 0.8 to sync till the end successfully. I've had corrupted blockchain and wallets, and the latest try resulted in similar errors that you posted, somewhere around 3500 blocks left. With 0.7 I had no problems.

On this PC however, I've had no problems with 0.8.

Reindexing helps me getting closer to the end of the chain. But it's slow as hell :'( One step forward, two steps back.

Edit: going back to 0.7.2. Hope future releases take care of this problem.

That sounds a lot like some kind of hardware failure.

On two machines ? Very unlike.

Re-indexing the block chain is unusually intensive. If there are minor faults being introduced by your HDD then most apps probably wouldn't detect them for a long time but Bitcoin is very sensitive to it. If it's not hardware related why are you seeing signature check failures (can only be caused by bad hardware, pretty much) and other machines are working fine?

I agree with Mike Hearn that this is likely the cause. The PC I had this problem with is a 5 year old laptop which just might be breaking down slowly but surely. It's not a problematic PC otherwise but I guess LevelDB is intensive enough to be problematic if there is even a small flaw with the HD.

Maybe I need a new laptop. :)

Or just a new drive for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

After finally absolutely having to upgrade from my oldschool 0.3.16 or something version, I have to say this is looking way more polished. Nice work all around :)

Or take it apart and clean out five years worth of lint and fuzz and put new thermal compound on the CPU cooler:
http://www.logonfixit.com/images/laptop_vent/inside_view.jpg

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04, all upgrades applied, in a VirtualBox.  Almost all networking is IPv6.  The VirtualBox has 512 MB (<--small, I know) RAM.
The host machine is a dell Optiplex GX620, XP-SP3, 4 GB ram, 3.00 GHz pentium 4

I created a new virtual machine, created a disk specifically for bitcoin, and mounted it on ~/.bitcoin.  I used ssh to copy the ~/.bitcoin directory over from the 0.7 installation.

My bitcoin.conf file includes
  connect=<my 0.7 installation address>
  onlynet=IPv6
  logtimestamps=1
  server=1

At startup, 0.8 seemed to index about 10-15 blocks / second.  I started it mid-day and the projections were that it would finish by 8PM last night.

At about 6AM this morning, it was still about 2,000 blocks from being indexed.  The speed had slowed to about 10-12 seconds / block.

With block 223,261 now onboard and everything current, and after erasing the old blockindex.dat file, du . shows 6,842,184 bytes.  This includes some logfiles that include timestamps.

One thing I notice is that the menu (File, Help, & such) does not seem to display if the program is shut down, and then restarted.  If the window is maximized, these items show up again.

Congrats on running a 11 month old OS, on a 11 year old OS on a 10 years old computer (P4 3.0GHz release April 2003). There weren't many people trying to use a 1991 computer (pre CD-ROM) in 2001 (post-Google).
http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/553919_10150909576738222_2001448042_n.jpg
Is this progress or a lack of progress?





You are not the first to report strangeness with Unity (the bastard pile of MacOS wannabe move-the-menu-to-the-top bs that Ubuntu slapped on Gnome in order to keep up with Windows 8 in the stupidifying of GUIs). There is an official issue here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/1242 where you can add your steps to replicate on 0.8.0.

The workaround is sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop.

Remember when Computer Shopper used to be the size of a phone book in a major metro area?

xubuntu-desktop or lubuntu-desktop will work too.

Remember when software was purchased as source code printed out in magazines and you had to key it all in to use it?

Sometimes they would just publish the binary, as a hex dump, and you had to type in the hex characters.  That was really painful.  At least while typing in source code you could get an idea of what was going on.  But hex just looks like hex...

can you remember the smell of paper tape?

I remember handing stacks of IBM punch cards through a window to a computer operator in the inner sanctum.
Each card contained one line of Fortran IV source code.

Software wasn't for woosies back then. 8)

I don't think GPUs lend themselves to ECDSA validation very well. It's an interesting idea, though.

For all the people interested in getting Bitcoin 0.8 into the newest version of Ubuntu - to be released in April - please mark this bug as affecting you: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bitcoin/+bug/1130638

i dont know about causes but it was vary slow going for me. especially the last 10%(which i didnt have to begin with) i also had some kind of error while downloading when i had around 3000 blocks remaining. the client just stopped downloading them. the progress bar vanished, it still showed on the bottom right that it still had more to go and the client itself still showed i wasnt fully up to date. i had to close the program and reopen it to get it to continue where it did eventually finish, i wasnt paying attention to download time, but it was hours.

to be clear, reindexing was clearly fast, but downloading new blocks is just as slow as it has always been. and it would have been nice if the program deleted the old blocks or at least gave some info as to why it was using so much disk space. in the end i just ended up moving the old blockchain files to see if it would work without them. when it did i just deleted them. if i had to go back a version for some reason i would have just re downloaded the blockchain, no big deal.

I send 20btc today from Bitcoin-Qt without selecting any fee but i saw in blockchain info that a fee of 0.01000022 has been issued!
is this a bug or something else? should i set a default fee? how low?
Also it could be great if we are able to select the address that sent btc from.
The client just use all my available addresses!  :)

blockchain.info grossly misrepresents how Bitcoin works in various ways.
Please check your client to see the actual fee (double-click on the transaction on the Transactions page, if there is a fee it will show "Transaction fee: x BTC" - if it doesn't show this exact line, there was no fee paid).
Bitcoin does not have "from" addresses.

thanks Luke junior :p
indeed no "fee" line exists in transaction details!
for one moment i was afraid that bitcoin network start using fees by its own :D

I remember my Dad used to bring rolls of it home from work and we'd make Christmas decorations out of it.  I remember starting to decode a tape one time, looking up the ASCII codes one by one and hoping to find official secrets or something.  I gave up after "10 REM STAR TREK GAME" or some such.

LOL.  Looks like you did.

Long-time user, here.  Just launched 0.8 for the first time.  I have the setting made to connect through proxy only (Tor).  The new client inherited that setting from previous installations.  I FORGOT to launch Tor, but the blockchain is downloading anyway.  

If I am not mistaken, this means it is connecting to the network, ignoring the proxy checked setting.

UPDATE:  It stopped syncing at 26 days left.  So maybe the bootstrapped portion of the block does not go through proxy?

The reindex comes off your hard drive (previous version's data).

Thank-you to all involved for your continued hard work and development.

During the upgrade if we want to pause it (e.g. to get some work done), what is the best way to do that?  I'm running on Ubuntu 12.04.

E.g. I ran "bitcoind -daemon"  (I wish I could leave that daemon running and have bitcoin-qt reference it....)

Is it safe to do a "bitcoind stop" in the middle of the upgrade?  Will I lose any work already done?

Or should I stop the process in mid-stride (kill -stop <processid>) and kill -cont it later?

I'd say both are safe.

I wouldn't do that, because if "something happens" this is equivalent to a crash. some pages before I did do some -9 kills and it corrupted my wallet and bitcoind didn't start any more. so, to be on the safe side, shut it down :)

Perhaps it would be better to respond to what was meant rather than what was said:

It could be great if we were able to select the outputs that were used as inputs. The client just seems to randomly select outputs.

Sorry if this has already been covered, but I can't seem to get the transaction fee setting to "stick" after I close the client.  It only works for as long as the client stays running, and if I shut it down and restart it again the transaction fee to send goes back to .00000000 BTC. Any ideas on this one?

Probably paytxfee=0.00 in the bitcoin.conf file.

Yep, I already reported that.

This happens to me too. (tested on 3 different machines)

Why does Bitcoin-qt hog 99% of CPU for WinXP, slow down and make itself unusable, when downloading the last 10000 blocks or so? I cannot afford to burn my cpu at 80+ degrees celsius for days for downloading the last gigs of blockchain - where would high cpu resources used anyway, isn't the client doing mainly just download and not processing tasks?

Sorry if a wrong thread, it's frustrating to be unable to use the client since versions from past year or so. I would like to say bad design, but of course won't do it here.

If you don't have the resources to run Bitcoin-Qt, consider moving to MultiBit or some other lighter weight wallet app.

No, blockchain download spends most of its time mainly processing the data.
You can thank flooders like SatoshiDice for making 10000 times more transactions than they should.

They have their own problems...

If a fair 2GHz Pentium M Thinkpad with 2GB cannot handle the blockchain, it's sure gonna be a turnoff for a billion potential mainstream adopters. Needing a dual or quad core to process blockchain and then transferring it to the laptop (which I doubt will go smoothly) is not exactly user friendly - but who said it would be at this phase  :)

I see, the recent blocks contain magnitudes of orders more transactions and thus process very slowly.

At quick thought the only way forward will soon be centralized servers handling the blockchain, and using lightweight clients fetching only wallet related data. This has probably been discussed at great length here somewhere.

If your cpu is overheating then you have a problem, and blaming bitcoin for that is not the solution. 80+ C°???? Your cpu has something wrong, my cpu at 100% runs at 65°, and it's a quadcore with the default cooler!

Bitcoin use the cpu to verify these blocks

the reason the later blocks are taking longer is that they are bigger.  which means the verification process takes longer.

Bitcoin-Qt is very CPU intensive. I wouldn't mind slightly slower processing if it limited how much it uses CPU, or if there was a setting for that. I have a 3ghz Intel Quad core, which is a decent CPU, and my PC becomes very laggy during the phase where Bitcoin-Qt does all the validations. The CPU usage is essentially 90%+ on all cores which leaves little to any other programs.

The new version also corrupts the blockchain more often in my experience. We've had multiple reports to our site of corrupt blockchains with the new version, definitely more than before. I've personally experienced it with my second PC, as I already reported. I've considered reporting these instances in more detail because I think it is quite problematic. It's possible that these are "very rare cases" that I just happened to run to but I've seen similar reports in Bitcointalk by some others as well.

With the earlier versions corrupted blockchain/wallet was actually very rare, now it isn't that rare anymore. Or maybe there just was a random spike in the problems, I don't know.

There are no known corruption bugs in the software. It's possible that LevelDB punishes the hardware more, especially with the recent uptick in activity, and this is more likely to expose bad hardware (which is a lot more common than you'd think).

Over time people running nodes on their random overclocked/dusty gaming PCs will become less common for this kind of reason. For now it's nice to be able to keep nodes running on desktops rather than servers though.

bitcoind -par=N: Set the number of script verification threads (1-16, 0=auto, default: 0). Set it to e.g. your number of CPU cores minus one so you'll always have an available core for other tasks.

If on Unix, you can also use the "nice" mechanism.

nitpicking: and you can also add ioniceness:

nice ionice -c 3 bitcoind [...]

But he was talking about CPU, not disk, usage.

I just submitted a pull request that would enable users to leave one CPU core free by saying -par=-1, regardless of the number of existing cores.

If you're on Windows go to task manager and click on the process to change affinity (number of cores used, set it to 1 or 2) and priority (set it to the lowest value so that it won't take inconveniently lot amount of cpu power while you are working).

Well, due to the less frequent interrupts, the pipelining works better, smoother experience. And -1 on a single core machine could be fatal ;-)

Emphasis mine.. I'm not over clocked or otherwise tampered with, but it really has been a long time since I ran any stress tests on this machine so maybe that's the case for me.

I'm curious as I actually had a hell of a time with this upgrade. I eventually realized the issues I had were entirely my own doing, so I know my enviroment is unrelated but I'm wondering for future reference if the enviroment I am using could cause more issues down the road. I run this particular client in a Ubuntu/Pinguy OS VM using VMware player on a Win7 host machine. The host machine is a reasonably powerful quad core Intel with HT, and more then enough memory to support itself and so far I've had 5 different VM's running at once, usually allocated 1.5 - 2 GB of memory. I find this offers a significant benefit when syncing a fresh client especially when using a bootstrap.dat to kick things off. As long as I'm not in a big hurry for it to process and finish syncing, this lets me easily dedicate 2 cores to the VM and let me be as productive as normal on a different VM or within the host machine. In this case it was not the cause of my problems, but now I am curious if using a VM enviroment open up more chances for corruption of the block chain or wallets? Less possibly because it is an isolated system? Any thoughts on doing things in this fashion? My goals were security for my coins, portability to move wallets easily (I usually just transfer the whole VM) and easy backup and redundancy. Encrypted wallet residing inside encrypted VM, and host storage of VM's is all encrypted when not in use as well. Perhaps a little redundant, but I feel a little safer this way should one of my backups ever fall into some others hands.

Issues that I'd had before with my notebook *freezing* at every new block arrival have *gone*. :)

It is much smoother and appears to be much quicker (in catching up blocks) also.

Great stuff guys!!

Hey guys, any idea why I can't get bitcoin-qt to see and use my new data directory?
I am using Linux and the .bitcoin folder is now 13Gb in size. WTF! This must be wrong.
I now only have about 200Mb left on my home drive.
So, I have moved the .bitcoin folder to another computer on my home network, but when I run the
"bitcoin-qt -datadir=/home/*******/BITCOIN/.bitcoin"
from the command line, it launches but opens with an empty wallet, and recreates a new .bitcoin folder in my old Home partition, and
starts to redownload from the internet.

This is not good news.

Any ideas?

You're not very clear.  You're talking about moving your data to an other computer.  Are you trying to use NFS or something?   I doubt so.  I suspect you're talking about mounting your .bitcoin directory on an other partition.  Which is the simplest solution to your problem.  If you do so, you can also use symbolic links to store your wallet somewhere else.

Also, it might be necessary to define the new location for your datadir in bitcoin.conf (which must be present in both destination, I guess).   Though just on command line should be enough, normally.

Hi grondilu, yes I am using an NFS partition, and yes I am talking about moving the data to another computer.
The issue being, I can't mount .bitcoin on another partition, and I don't think that requires an individual entry in fstab, as the folder it is placed in is mounted anyway.

My system does not have a bitcoin.conf anywhere.

Hey thanks for your help.

Finally got the symlink working.

Nice 1.

That's because bitcoin-qt does not create it by default.  You're required to make one only when running bitcoind IIRC.

Just make one in your .bitcoin directory.

A LOT faster than before, thanks guys!

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