Got SSDs and tested. My conclusion is here.


So,

With HDD and maybe 4GB for dbcache, 2 to 3 weeks in 12 hours. GUI stalled badly.

With HDD and 16GB for dbcache, 5 weeks in 2 to 3 hours. GUI still stalled badly I think.

With SSD and 16GB for dbcache, 2 weeks in less than one hour. Maybe less than 30 minutes? And GUI felt less unresponsive.


Roughly, 10 times speed increase with bigger dbcache, another 2x increase with SSD and same dbcache.

My benchmarks aren't equal because I didn't have much blockchain left when I got RAM and SSD upgrades. But roughly.


With Monero,

RAM upgrade didn't help.

With HDD speed was 500 to 600 blocks/h during the final 50000 to 100000 blocks.

With SSD, speed was around 5000 blocks/h, a bit more or a bit less at times. So 10x increase in speed.


A year ago perhaps, when I benchmarked file systems, I got over 5000 blocks/h on HDD. Up to 9000 blocks/h at times. But Monero has some kind of checkpointing that speeds up syncing I think? So these cannot be compared to today's results?


It must be said that this computer is not new, and my cryptocurrency stuff are running in a virtual machine. The disk is passed to the virtual machine and I don't know how much overhead this brings.

Thank you, for answers.

Finally, actually, I got "pro level" answers instead of just "works fine for me", "can u show ur logfiles", "just get SSD bruh". 

I got a cheap RAM upgrade, set dbcache to 16GB (was 4GB or 6GB), started syncing.

At some point the GUI had stalled very badly, I could do nothing so I shut down Bitcoin-qt and it shut down cleanly. When I restarted it the blockchain was in fully synced state. So my remaining 5 weeks were synced in 2 to 3 hours, much faster than before.

I don't know if the GUI would have recovered if I had waited for some more time. Maybe I tried to use it just at the critical moment. It's unknown for now.


Monero did not get faster than before and the last 50000 to 100000 blocks seem to be much slower than anything before. I didn't find any option similar to dbcache in Bitcoin. 600 blocks/h is the speed now. Used to be 2200 blocks/h for quite long. I benchmarked different file systems and certain types were occasionally faster than that but fell to the same slow level at some point.

Maybe it's SSD time next.

I'm syncing my Bitcoin wallet blockchain using latest Bitcoin Core on Linux.

It progresses very very slowly, right now 2 to 3 weeks in 12 hours.

CPU and net usage stay low most of the time, problem is not there (most likely). HDD usage is constant, I think that's probably the bottleneck. It's a 7200rpm standard desktop HDD.

10 years ago I could sync the blockchain on a slow 5400rpm laptop HDD without major issues.

Time to buy big SSD perhaps.

But the interesting question is,
Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

Or has something happened to the protocol so it would be harder now?

Or has the code quality of Bitcoin Core gone down?


The GUI also stalls badly during sync. I don't remember when this problem began but it did not always exist.

Syncing monero is also extremely slow and it has been so as long as I can remember.  But that's another story.