Big periods of inactivity while syncing the blockchain

[cellard]

As you can see there, it takes a long time between download activity to start, then it stops again, has a big period of inactivity, and then downloads a bit more, has another period of inactivity... it's really annoying. Sometimes it just wouldn't start downloading again, and I have to end up closing and opening again the client. This has been happening to me since the early Bitcoin-qt days. My connectivity is good as far as I know, I got a decent amount of peers connected.

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[ranochigo]

It takes a lot more than your internet to synchronize your wallet. The common issue is with the CPU. Try opening your task manager and see if the usage is rising as the download stops.

Else, if you increase your dbcache, it would certainly help you with the synchonizing significantly.

[cellard]

It takes a lot more than your internet to synchronize your wallet. The common issue is with the CPU. Try opening your task manager and see if the usage is rising as the download stops.

Else, if you increase your dbcache, it would certainly help you with the synchonizing significantly.

What dbcache value should I be using and what does this dbcache value is choosen in respect to? like depending on how much RAM you got, or CPU power?

I've got 8 gigs of RAM, I got a pretty old CPU tho, it's a 2008 quadcore, but still serves me well in most tasks. Modern CPU's have the Intel Management spywarefest so I never bothered updating.

I will try to monitor later the CPU cycles and see if they go during these gaps, probably could be that it's processing the blocks and can't download and process at the same time??

[fabioganga]

As you can see there, it takes a long time between download activity to start, then it stops again, has a big period of inactivity, and then downloads a bit more, has another period of inactivity... it's really annoying. Sometimes it just wouldn't start downloading again, and I have to end up closing and opening again the client. This has been happening to me since the early Bitcoin-qt days. My connectivity is good as far as I know, I got a decent amount of peers connected.

Try launching your wallet adding this paramatere: -dbcache=500

You can also put this same instruction in the bitcoin.conf file if you prefer.

[LoyceV]

I will try to monitor later the CPU cycles and see if they go during these gaps, probably could be that it's processing the blocks and can't download and process at the same time??

I've noticed the same: it downloads in batches, then processes them.

[HCP]

syncing is NOT just simply about downloading all the blocks... Your node must then validate each and every block... which involves validating each and every transaction inside each and every block and making sure that signatures and hashes all match up as they should.

This is relatively CPU intensive work... Older CPUs (even quadcores) will struggle.

The wallet will download large chunks of data and then validate it before downloading more data... and with a decent network connection, it is able to fill the data "buffer" a lot faster than the CPU can process it all. So, it quite often looks like it is "doing nothing" if you just look at the network activity. Take a look at your CPU usage while syncing, I'm sure you'll see a VERY different usage pattern