Bitcoin Forum

Aside from using certain commands on Bitcoin-based wallets such as increasing the "dbcache" and "maxconnections", do you know of any other method that's the fastest way to sync a crypto wallet? I'm mostly interested in doing a quick sync of the Bitcoin Core wallet, yet even after setting the "dbcache" to 2048 and "maxconnections" to 15, the wallet takes a long time to obtain the data from the Blockchain.

I believe that the process would be accelerated if I'd download a "bootstrap.dat" somewhere, but I can't seem to find the most recent one around the web. My main purpose is to establish a Bitcoin full node in the shortest time possible. Then, I can apply the same techniques to other Bitcoin-based coins like Litecoin and Dogecoin.

Nonetheless, I would appreciate any help I can get in this regard. Thanks in advance. :)

Uhmm, if you have a shite router or network adapter, try using a cable instead and see if that increases download speeds. (It does for me)
Other than that, i don't think there's any other way to magically increase your UP/DOWN speed.

I think what you're looking for is discontinued.

https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.10.0#faster-synchronization

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/37927/what-happened-to-the-bootstrap-dat-provided-by-bitcoin-org

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3059396.msg31517441#msg31517441

15 maxconnections means you allow 8 outgoing & 7 incoming connection which won't help you sync faster. AFAIK you can't increase maximum outgoing connection without modify source code of Bitcoin Core.

If Bitcoin Core doesn't use maximum speed of your connection and CPU/Storage isn't holding back (bottleneck), you might want try your luck by connect to different node (usually closer to your region).
See https://bitnodes.earn.com/ for list of known nodes which accept incoming connection.

For quite some time - clearly more than a year - using bootstrap.dat was no longer faster than simply letting the wallet sync.
What you could do for speed would be wired internet connection, since usually it's more stable and faster than WiFi and having the data folder (even temporarily) on SSD.

As AdolfinWolf pointed out, configuring the maxconnection has nothing to do with syncing the core faster. The syncing of core relies with the faster internet connection and the faster processing speed of your computer which runs the core. The downloading needs to be speeder and that can be achieved with a faster internet connection. Once the blockchain has downloaded, the wallet needs to process other outgoing transactions which needs the memory of your computer. Probably that can be configured by changing the dbcache value in the bitcoin.conf file.

-maxconnections are used for validating the created blocks and for checking the double spending. You can increase the maxconnections to the default 25 connections (i.e 8 outgoing and 17 incoming). It would help the network more and will allow you to contribute more to the network.


That's true. But if OP uses a USB HDD, it would be painful for him to keep up with the processing as a wired HDD would process only a limited number of operations per second. @OP what do you use to store the database files and the blockchain? It is better to have the db in a internal storage rather than having them in external one.

Thanks for the tip. Using a Gigabit Ethernet connection with a CAT-6e cable seems to have increased speeds by a long shot. I've been previously using WIFI to sync the Blockchain, but I guess that it's not ideal for quickly syncing Bitcoin Core. Since I have around 4GB of RAM available, I've set the -dbcache to a value of 2048 to see how further does Blockchain synchronization speeds increase.



Thanks for letting me know about this. I was unaware that "bootstrap.dat" was discontinued after using SPV wallets for a long time. I guess that I've been farther away from the latest developments of Bitcoin's full node implementation than I've thought. The "bootstrap.dat" was a great feature though, since you could easily backup the Blockchain data for use on another node.

As there is no other method to recur to, I'll be playing with "-dbcache" a bit along with a stable LAN connection via Ethernet while syncing. Hope that I could get back on track to support the Bitcoin network in the least time possible.



Thank you. I've switched to a wired connection now, with gigabit speeds. The performance obtained is much better than with WIFI by a long shot. Greatly useful for faster synchronization times. Now, while I don't have any SSD yet, I could use a 256GB SSD which will be plenty for establishing a Bitcoin full node (at least for a while). ::)



Thanks for the tip, mate! I will definitely keep this in mind when reconfiguring my full node. I've found out that most of my connections where blocked from the firewall I have installed (ZoneAlarm) so I had to disable it until I'm fully synced with the Blockchain. Now that I'm using a wired connection, and half of my RAM (2GB for dbcache) so things should speed up a bit. :)



Thank you for asking. I'm actually using an external HDD connected via a USB 3.0 port. I know that USB 3.0 is not as fast as a regular SATA port, but my options are limited since the internal HDD is very limited in space (64GB) which is not enough for downloading the full Blockchain. I'm running Windows 10 on it, so swapping the internal HDD is not an option at the moment.

Still though, if syncing doesn't get any faster, then I'll go ahead and buy a 256GB SSD. I could just clone the 64GB internal HDD into the new SSD in order to upgrade my node for the benefit of the Bitcoin Blockchain.