block downloading question

[HorseRider]

The blockchain download is really time consuming. I started to download the block 2 days ago, and it is not completed. This is really confusing for me.

If the blockchain is all the same, and there are tens of thousands nodes running on the internet, which means I can connect to 100~200 nodes to ask for the data, and download the blockchain from all of them at the same time. I can use all the bandwidth to download the data.  But this is not what happened.  I can see that my node only connected to 8 other nodes, and download at only 30~50KB/s. sometimes it stopped downloading. 

My node does not contribute very much to the network, too. my upload speed is very low.

My the bitcoin blockchain updates does not work in a emule style?

[DannyHamilton]

It's not the downloading of the blockchain that takes so long.  Your computer has to verify every block since the beginning. It is the verification of the blocks that takes so long.

[CIYAM]

You can download the entire blockchain up until the last checkpoint in order to save a lot of the sync time from here: http://eu2.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/
(instructions are included on the site)

[niko]

Also, slightly off-topic: since you say you only see eight connections, your client is not listening for new connections. Try enabling uPnP on your router and in the client, or manually forward port 8333 from your router to your machine. Note, you should asign a static LAN IP to your machine in the case of manual forward.

[CIYAM]

As was noted by Danny having more connections is not really going to help wrt the speed of obtaining blocks - in fact limiting the connection to just a single one (that is the fastest you have a connection to) would probably be better for that purpose.

Having more connections is only really better in that it makes any sort of "spoofing" attack a much more difficult proposal as well as increasing the general size/strength of the Bitcoin network.

[finway]

try this much faster pre0.8 edition:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/builds/pre-0.8/
The bottleneck is verification&disk seeking, not the network.

You can import blocks from local files to save your time:
bitcoin.exe -loadblock=DATA_DIR/blk0001.dat -loadblock=DATA_DIR/blk0002.dat

[HorseRider]

try this much faster pre0.8 edition:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/builds/pre-0.8/
The bottleneck is verification&disk seeking, not the network.

You can import blocks from local files to save your time:
bitcoin.exe -loadblock=DATA_DIR/blk0001.dat -loadblock=DATA_DIR/blk0002.dat

Thanks for all the answering to my question.

If I buy a IDE flash disk, how much it help?

[finway]

try this much faster pre0.8 edition:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/builds/pre-0.8/
The bottleneck is verification&disk seeking, not the network.

You can import blocks from local files to save your time:
bitcoin.exe -loadblock=DATA_DIR/blk0001.dat -loadblock=DATA_DIR/blk0002.dat

Thanks for all the answering to my question.

If I buy a IDE flash disk, how much it help?

It may save 1/2 - 1/3 of your time, i guess, never tried.