Importing blockchain data file really slow

[sdp]

Yesterday, I opened Bitcoin-qt.exe with the -loadblock= option.  i can see the block chain has gone up by a few hundred megabytes.  Today, it is still loading.  it is no where near done.  I estimate it will be finished by the Wednesday after tomorrow but not before.  Is this normal?   

Shawn

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[Stephen Gornick]

Yesterday, I opened Bitcoin-qt.exe with the -loadblock= option.  i can see the block chain has gone up by a few hundred megabytes.  Today, it is still loading.  it is no where near done.  I estimate it will be finished by the Wednesday after tomorrow but not before.  Is this normal?  

With hardware that performs poorly (CPU and storage) those numbers aren't unheard of but slower than it should be it seems.

You aren't by chance using an encrypted filesystem, are you?  Or have Dropbox trying to backup the blockchain at the same time as it is being created?

Neither of those are good for bitcoin blockchain files.

An upcoming release of the Bitcoin.org client will do a much better job at this but it is not even to the testing phase yet so tht shouldn't be something you want to wait on.

[sdp]

It's a laptop running 1 GHz 1GB of RAM and Vista using 256kb/s connection.  Slow as computers go.  I noticed it was fast at the beginning and got slower as it added more blocks.  It was loading hundreds of blocks a second at first.  Now, it takes two seconds per block.

[nlev]

It's just taken me 36 hours to download the block index with the bitcoin-qt app, and that's on a dual-core Athlon 4400+ with 4Gb ram and SATA drives.  I stopped it and moved the blkindex file onto a RAM-based filesystem halfway through which helped speed quite a bit, though I didn't have enough RAM spare to put the data files in too.

I do feel that this is one aspect of bitcoins that isn't going to scale too well in the future as the block history keeps growing, and won't be compatible with mobile computing.  Personal clients and wallets may become the exception rather than the rule, as they'll exceed the capacity of mobile devices as well as the transfer limits on data plans.  As a newcomer I'd be interested to read up on any future plans or directions if anyone knows where to find them ?

[Stephen Gornick]

It's a laptop running 1 GHz 1GB of RAM and Vista using 256kb/s connection.  Slow as computers go.  I noticed it was fast at the beginning and got slower as it added more blocks.  It was loading hundreds of blocks a second at first.  Now, it takes two seconds per block.

Ya, that's not suitable hardware for running Vista itself, nonetheless the bitcoin-qt for pulling a full blockchain.  Even once it is caught up the blockchain verification will make the system appear non-responsive.  It technically can work, it will just be very slow.

I do feel that this is one aspect of bitcoins that isn't going to scale too well in the future as the block history keeps growing, and won't be compatible with mobile computing.

End users don't need to run the full blockchain.  Multibit is an SPV client , and Bitcoin Wallet for Android is an SPV client for mobile.  These pull block headers only on initial sync. 

And for those who do need the full blockchain:

An upcoming release of the Bitcoin.org client will do a much better job at this but it is not even to the testing phase yet  [Edit: just reached the "test-if you dare" phase] so that shouldn't be something you want to wait on.