Coming soon: Sync the whole blockchain in 14 mins 5 secs

[jim618]

One of the improvements in the upcoming bitcoinj v0.8 is a quicker blockstore. This is used to store the block information on disk.

I just tried out an import of my blockchain.info wallet backup (31 private keys) on coffee shop wifi (100 KB/s down) right from the genesis block.

To replay all the blocks from the genesis block to block 228608 took 14 minutes 5 seconds on my Mac laptop. It was only using 20% of CPU time - I've a dual core 2 GHz machine. That works out as an average of 270 block/s.

Good work Mike !

[Mike Hearn]

Great, looking forward to the release.

That said, full chain replay isn't a situation users should ever normally encounter. The bottleneck when doing that is actually CPU on the remote bitcoind peer, so I'm not surprised your laptop sat at 20%. Mostly, users will only ever have to scan the part of the chain that they didn't see yet because their computer was off or MultiBit wasn't running - hopefully only a few weeks or months at most, so mostly synchronisation should be over in seconds or at worst a minute.

[jim618]

Yup - that 270 blocks/s works out at about a month's worth of sync in 15 seconds. That's more typical.

I can imagine you might have a Trezor as a savings wallet that you don't use very often. Say you plug it in once a year to check it is ok. Then a 12 months sync would take 3 minutes. That's probably the longest wait most people would see.

edit: ps: really like the checkpointing as it drops the installer size from around 30MB to 12MB !