How to speed up the syncing process of Bitcoin-QT under Mac OS X Mavericks

[botolo86]

Hello Friends,

I have been trying to sync my Bitcoin-QT app under Mac OS X Mavericks for days and everything was going soooooooo slow! I kept leaving the Mac on the whole time, even during night, but the syncing process was going extremely slow. My Mac is a recent iMac with 8GB of RAM, 1 TB of HD and I have a fast internet connection.

I finally found the solution and the sync just switched from super slow to super fast and I completed more than 60% of the sync in just one day.

How did I do that? Easy peasy (and I wonder why I did not think about this before).

Mac OS X Mavericks introduces a neat feature, which can be troublesome when you try to sync your Bitcoin app. This feature is called App Nap and it basically slows down any app running in the background (http://www.apple.com/osx/advanced-technologies/).

You need to turn this feature off for the Bitcoin-QT client. Just right-click on the app's icon, select GET INFO and then check the PREVENT APP NAP feature.

Done, your client will start syncing super fast.

I hope the above is helpful to other fellow Mac users and Bitcoin enthusiasts.

[ak84]

Interesting, thanks for the info. My wallet already synced after 2 days nonstop so I can't test it out.

It is helpful to download bootstrap.dat via torrent for new users as well.

[eikebit]

Awesome tip. I hadn't opened my wallet in a while and had to sync again. It worked a treat!

[botolo86]

Awesome tip. I hadn't opened my wallet in a while and had to sync again. It worked a treat!

Fantastic, I am glad this tip was helpful!

[brendon]

Just a heads up for anybody else having issues, see if you have a 'file shield' anti-virus running. I had Avast running, and Bitcoin-Qt was importing about 1 block per second -- which would have taken me many days to complete. (As soon as Bitcoin-Qt opened, Avast started using about 90% of CPU -- obviously running virus scans on the IO). Disabling the file shield I managed to get 150 per second imported.

[ShawnLeary]

Interesting, thanks for the info. My wallet already synced after 2 days nonstop so I can't test it out.

It is helpful to download bootstrap.dat via torrent for new users as well.

Did this and still doesn't speed up the process.  Why doesn't bitcoin-qt use the torrents to download the blockchain on its own?

[liquidcoin]

Thanks for the info. it worked for me.

[ZimCoin]

Thank God for you and the app nap suggestion!

[nixon99]

Thanks, very useful tip.

[naturallin]

Thanks!

I will try it and see how fast it'll sync.

[Zebracrypto]

I will test this out.

Thank you

[Ninazu]

For El Capitan/Sierra

Code:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist LSAppNapIsDisabled -bool YES