First synchronization of Bitcoin Wallet taking days!!

[freerealm]

Hello
 Ive had a good look around and cant seem to find any plain speaking help, Im new to bitcoin and have downloaded the wallet Bitcoin qt, I started the program 4 days ago and synchronizing started fine going really fast but then after about 5 hrs it slowed to a dribble its 94.28% done and today i saw a warning msg on the wallet
Warning: Displayed transactions may not be correct! You may need to upgrade, or other nodes may need to upgrade.

i strangely have 13122 blocks remaining, when yesterday it was down to 9000 odd  , I just want to get started something must be wrong, the program has full access through my firewall.

can someone please give me some help? it would be much appreciated.

how do I restart synchronization if need be?
cheers

[freerealm]

hey thanks for the quick reply, nice one,

thanks for the advice, I dont mind waiting if its normal but I dont want to be waiting like a lemon for something thats never coming. the warning thats displayed is that anything to worry about? and the fact i have more blocks remaining today than i did yesterday, does it go backwards?
sorry if these are dumb questions but its only easy when you know the answer.

thanks again

[SilverBull]

I had my doubts too, but ultimately it finished. Made my system very slow while fetching chain, grinding away on my hard drive.

[freerealm]

Ive got the latest version, my PC sounds fine bitcoinQT is using about 150,000k of memory its not sapping all the resources by a long shot, its weird.
as i said at first it was flying along and i thought it would be done easily in 6 hrs which is what the documentation said it roughly takes (cant remember where) but now its hardly moved for days, stuck @ 94.27%

so I dont know if somethings gone wrong and i need to delete everything and start again, HELP! :-)

[deepceleron]

I updated this long post:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51456

[freerealm]

thanks for the links ansd stuff but it still doesnt answer really,  sync has not moved for days!! not at all, not by 1 block

there is a warning msg on the bitcoinQT wallet about nodes may need updating.
I have 8 active connections (max allowed with out port forwarding i believe)
when i hover over the sync icon bottom right corner it says: Catching up, 216374 blocks processed out of 229515

so need to confirm that the first sync normally doesnt move for days
i have a quad core AMD cpu @ over 3ghz, 8gig ram, Geforce GTX 550 Ti Gcard

Im thinking, start again.

[deepceleron]

If you need to diagnose a Bitcoin client that is not downloading blocks, you should investigate two potential causes:

1. Network problems or bad peer

Do you have several connections to other peers? Hover over the "signal bars" in the lower right - how many connections do you have? Are you running firewall/antivirus software that might be interfering with your Bitcoin connection?

You may have randomly connected to a bad node that is not sending blocks when requested. A restart of the client may establish new connections if the current block number doesn't progress within 15 minutes or so.

2. Corrupted blockchain database

Usually occurs (and will continue to occur) due to hardware problems. Bitcoin has 100% CPU usage and heavy disk access while downloading/verifying the blockchain, and will reveal hardware faults that other programs didn't. Even a laptop fan plugged up with lint can make for a crashy Bitcoin computer. If you are overclocking, don't.

Check the debug.log and db.log in the Bitcoin data directory, the end of the log files may have messages that reveal the problems Bitcoin is having.

[freerealm]

here is a clip from the log file, this was taken from the end of the log file, seems ok but i may be missing something:

Added 1 addresses from 24.28.66.172: 332 tried, 14356 new
Added 1 addresses from 216.119.158.145: 332 tried, 14357 new
Added 1 addresses from 75.118.142.28: 332 tried, 14357 new
stored orphan tx b9b400c3e2 (mapsz 6940)
stored orphan tx f1f73dbfdd (mapsz 6941)
Added 1 addresses from 24.28.66.172: 332 tried, 14357 new
Added 1 addresses from 91.153.71.25: 332 tried, 14357 new
stored orphan tx 028ac35839 (mapsz 6942)
stored orphan tx 7c68a41d3b (mapsz 6943)
stored orphan tx 4e18b016b5 (mapsz 6944)
Added 1 addresses from 80.121.89.20: 332 tried, 14358 new
stored orphan tx f3c1699991 (mapsz 6945)
stored orphan tx a20887fef9 (mapsz 6946)
stored orphan tx eeb777d79a (mapsz 6947)
stored orphan tx 949aabbaa1 (mapsz 6948)
Added 1 addresses from 89.247.65.78: 332 tried, 14357 new
stored orphan tx b117b13812 (mapsz 6949)
stored orphan tx 6ccbebe677 (mapsz 6950)
Added 1 addresses from 24.28.66.172: 332 tried, 14357 new
stored orphan tx a70e7889fc (mapsz 6951)
CTxMemPool::accept() : accepted 7bacd0c095 (poolsz 179)
Added 2 addresses from 2.82.85.49: 332 tried, 14357 new
Added 1 addresses from 12.23.127.175: 332 tried, 14357 new
stored orphan tx a3e030bfc5 (mapsz 6952)
stored orphan tx 1b92817cbc (mapsz 6953)
stored orphan tx abc8e56d87 (mapsz 6954)

I have 14 active connections to bitcoin network. still no movement, im purplexed

Thanks for your help people its really appreciated.

Oh and my CPU usage is only about 25-35%
and using the latest commodo internet security as far as i know bitcoin has free access to net, i made an application rule allowing it on any port etc etc

[doobadoo]

thanks for the links ansd stuff but it still doesnt answer really,  sync has not moved for days!! not at all, not by 1 block

there is a warning msg on the bitcoinQT wallet about nodes may need updating.
I have 8 active connections (max allowed with out port forwarding i believe)
when i hover over the sync icon bottom right corner it says: Catching up, 216374 blocks processed out of 229515

so need to confirm that the first sync normally doesnt move for days
i have a quad core AMD cpu @ over 3ghz, 8gig ram, Geforce GTX 550 Ti Gcard

Im thinking, start again.

Yeah, the newer blocks have more tx's in them and that makes it slower to update the last few blocks....  As long as its making progress by adding a few blocks a minute i wouldn't worry.

The devs are very much aware of this slowness and have been speeding up the code recently.  Ultimately a method of "pruning" the block chain will be implemented which will greatly reduce the size of what you need to download and speed up the verification.  Also, do you have a fast internet connection?  Right now a slow connection like slow dsl service will be the limiting factor, otherwise its your HD seek time, and lastly processor, but modern processors should be able to verify several hundred tx/sec, or dozens of blocks/min.

[ewitte]

Hello
 Ive had a good look around and cant seem to find any plain speaking help, Im new to bitcoin and have downloaded the wallet Bitcoin qt, I started the program 4 days ago and synchronizing started fine going really fast but then after about 5 hrs it slowed to a dribble its 94.28% done and today i saw a warning msg on the wallet
Warning: Displayed transactions may not be correct! You may need to upgrade, or other nodes may need to upgrade.

i strangely have 13122 blocks remaining, when yesterday it was down to 9000 odd  , I just want to get started something must be wrong, the program has full access through my firewall.

can someone please give me some help? it would be much appreciated.

how do I restart synchronization if need be?
cheers

What kind of connection?  I did two syncs a week or two ago and both took less than 8 hours.  I know the first time was on a 100Mbit connection. 

[Rampion]

I had my doubts too, but ultimately it finished. Made my system very slow while fetching chain, grinding away on my hard drive.

You are lucky. Just a couple of months ago, before 0.8 was released, a full sync could take almost a week on certains set ups. Now it's done in less than 24 hours on the same set up.

[argash]

you could always try a web based wallet like http://blockchain.info

[ewitte]

I'd like to point out if you use any web wallet it can be hacked or seized.  That was the downfall of e-gold when they got raided.

[deepceleron]

here is a clip from the log file, ...

The information seen at the end of the log snippet is normal background traffic, it is you receiving transactions over the network (orphan because you don't have the blocks funding them) and discovering peers. What you are looking for is the last entries where blocks are downloaded and the data surrounding them, this is a normal block receive:

Code:

received getdata (2 invsz)
received block 0000000000000111c9bedb948512caa42b8ef45846a05538632ecf445e9537bb
Committing 897 changed transactions to coin database...
SetBestChain: new best=0000000000000111c9bedb948512caa42b8ef45846a05538632ecf445e9537bb  height=229229  work=943252950598293494736  tx=15357338  date=2013-04-02 02:55:11
ProcessBlock: ACCEPTED
CTxMemPool::accept() : accepted 0643e0297e (poolsz 349)
received getdata for: block 0000000000000111c9bedb948512caa42b8ef45846a05538632ecf445e9537bb
received getdata for: block 0000000000000111c9bedb948512caa42b8ef45846a05538632ecf445e9537bb

I would say start over after deleting previous "blocks" and "chainstate" directories, but if you have a hardware problem corrupting the database or doing bad math, this won't fix the problem. If you get the bootstrap torrent, at least you won't have to download multiple times to attempt importing.

[Rampion]

you could always try a web based wallet like http://blockchain.info

Yeah, you can also transfer all your savings to instawallet.org

Try it, it's awesome, third party wallets are definitely the way to go.

[freerealm]

Thanks for all your advice, I think I will delete everything and start over, its been 4 days so somethings happened, better luck on my next try hopefully.

for the time being im going to use multibit. it synced in about ten seconds!!

so lets see how round 2 goes
thanks again

[Rampion]

Thanks for all your advice, I think I will delete everything and start over, its been 4 days so somethings happened, better luck on my next try hopefully.

for the time being im going to use multibit. it synced in about ten seconds!!

so lets see how round 2 goes
thanks again

Please note that my post above is ironic

[robcat]

I'm also noticing the updating of bitcoin-qt it's very slow.
What is the bottleneck here? My CPU is used only at 30% during the process, I've 2GB of RAM not used and the downloading of the blocks is at a rate of 500kB/s (the bandwidth for a normal download is usually 7MB/s).

Is the speed of the initial bootstrap limited by my hard disk drive read/write performance?

[Rampion]

Is the speed of the initial bootstrap limited by my hard disk drive read/write performance?

Yes

[zeroday]

you could always try a web based wallet like http://blockchain.info

Yeah, you can also transfer all your savings to instawallet.org

Try it, it's awesome, third party wallets are definitely the way to go.

Yes, it's awesome and comfortable way to lose your coins.


When you launch bitcoin-qt for the first time, it's advisable to download bootstrap data at torrent url (use in utorrent,etc):
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6FE493BA606847EAC163BAF35AAE9DB319735482&dn=bootstrap.dat&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80