Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

I've downloaded Bitcoin Core and set it up to download the blockchain (the full one since Armory apparently wants it),
It started out saying that it would take something like 5 years until complete, but has now gone down and stabilized at
2 years and 2 weeks.

That's.... A tad long, to be honest. Is there another way to quicken things up a bit?

It's running on an 11th gen i7 with 16GB RAM and a 1000 mbps internet connection.

//Jaggen

Your machine is good generation that would finish downloading all the blocks within  2-3 days.
Probably that 1000 mbps internet connection isn't downloading at that rate, check your internet connection or try it on another device to see if the speed is exactly what you stated.

With those specs, all I can think of is a terrible memory load. Are you using HDD or SSD? Do you have enough Peers connected? And is your system by any chance low on RAM and actively swapping?
If it is: close other applications. If it's not: set database cache (dbcache) to 6144 (6 GB) and restart Bitcoin Core.

Your sync should take about 8 hours.

First of all: do you have some 450 GB free on the disk you're saving the blockchain to? Please make sure you do.

Then.. I am 99% sure you're saving the blockchain onto HDD. But do you have by chance SSD on your system (there's a very good chance you do). If so, use symlinks for your chainstate folder (and if you have indexes, also to the index folder) to copy it to SSD. However, give a read to this topic and see what was proposed there: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5387672.0

It's either the drive being slow to read and write. If you've got a hdd you can defragment it and see if that speeds it up but you might want to get an ssd for a faster install.

How far are you up to with the syncs? Blocks tend to get more saturated around bull runs (especially the 2017 one) - also sometimes the estimator can be a bit random with its timings at some points too.

You could be running a node on a super computer it doesnt matter if the config is broken. Try to setup on testnet first and then go for the big chain.

Are you perhaps pertaining to the green-highlighted bar below the GUI?
If so, that's only the time-equivalent value of the number of blocks that you haven't downloaded yet.

For the actual estimated time, you should refer to the "Estimated time left until synced",
if you already closed the dialogue box that shows those info, simply click the mentioned 'green bar' below.

You have got a pretty decent internet connection speed, so I'd say that the problem is not that blockchain data is downloaded slowly. Most likely, your hardware doesn't provide relatively fast blockchain data validation, which is the process where your node checks every block, transaction, signatures, etc. To speed up the validation process, you can try to move part of the files from the bitcoin core folder to an SSD disc, which are known to have higher IOPs (input-output operations per second) when compared to traditional HDDs. All things being equal, the higher the IOPs of your disc is, the faster is going to be the synchronization with the bitcoin blockchain. If your SSD disc is too small in terms of available space to record all blockchain data, you can split your data directory using the following guide: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Splitting_the_data_directory

Thanks for all the input. I saw that the machine was bogged down with some other things, so set it up on another machine last night. An Intel Core i9 (12th gen) with 128GB RAM and NVMe disk for storage and it finished it in around 8 hours.

Not entirely sure what the issues were with the first machine, but hey ho, at least it seems to be working now. :)

I understand it is completely against the rules (and against the main reason why one has own server), but maybe it would be good to have somewhere (knock knock Loyce) a weekly/monthly dump of node data? I would allow people to launch their node without waiting too much and allow check old wallet's balance etc.


SSD?

I did that: Bitcoin Core pruned blockchain: download it here! (DON'T DO THIS!) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5177528.0) (but haven't updated it in years).

You haven't shared the config and the type of storage used so I'll just assume that it's set to default and both machines have the same type of Drive (SSD).

But with this message alone, I can guess that the first machine should've synced in a relatively same amount of time:
You observed that it synced 3-years worth of blocks, the last 2 years may be slower, but with that spec, it shouldn't take that long.
So it must be the 'time-equivalent amount of blocks left' instead of the actual estimated time to fully sync.

Here's the screenshot of the "green bar" that I was talking about (SigNet):
https://i.imgur.com/NUTdzbY.png (https://i.imgur.com/NUTdzbY.png)

Here's the screenshot of the actual estimated time (SigNet):
(opens right after starting Core or when you click the "green bar")
https://i.imgur.com/mvXpjHu.png (https://i.imgur.com/mvXpjHu.png)

The estimated completion time is based on download speeds that are recorded by Bitcoin Core at various interval, so if the download speed is not stable and fluctuates, you will get wildly different completion times. It is a problem with download measuring software at large.