bypassing bitcoin core sync process

[mimosizz]

i have downloaded the bitcoin core app last night and started sync but it just has got 9% of the blockchain in total. why is this slow as hell? looking for ways to bypass the sync process for bitcoin core. i have found electrum to use as alternative but read bitcoin core is the native wallet and have better features, benefits than wallet like electrum.

[ranochigo]

Bitcoin Core provides users with more features but they're mostly for advanced users and normal users who are looking to just receive and spend Bitcoins will likely never touch it at all.

Electrum is a great wallet but it comes at an expense of privacy and (slightly) in terms of it's security but it's perfectly fine for most users. If you want better privacy, look into Wasabi wallet.

Depending on your computer, the initial synchronization will take up to a few days and perhaps maximum of a week. You can probably bypass the synchronization process by downloading a pre-sync'ed data directory but that negates the benefits of having Bitcoin Core so I don't really recommend it.

[LoyceV]

it just has got 9% of the blockchain in total. why is this slow as hell?

From what I've seen you can improve performance by:

• Using SSD instead of HDD
• Having 16 GB RAM
• Setting dbcache (database cache) to 4096
• Using Linux instead of Windows (I've never tested Windows myself)
• Having a fast CPU if that becomes the new bottleneck
• Enough bandwidth tot download 350 GB in a few hours

[HCP]

why is this slow as hell?

It's generally a function of CPU/storage device/network... Note that your computer isn't just "downloading" 350 gigs... it has to process and validate all the transactions/blocks that it receives as well. This is disk/CPU heavy. If your hardware is not great (ie. HDD instead of SSD, older CPUs etc, low RAM), that will slow things down.

looking for ways to bypass the sync process for bitcoin core.

The only way to do this is to get a copy of the blockchain data from a fully synced node from a trusted source.

If you really don't want to wait and don't need to be running a full node, then switch to a lightweight "SPV" wallet like Electrum or Wasabi.

[pooya87]

Don't underestimate the power of having a lot of free ram. During the initial block download if the client can't store the entire UTXO set in ram it has to write keep writing it to disk and read it each time it wants to verify a block. It takes less than a micro second on my system to go though 100 million UTXOs (bitcoin currently has 68 million) if it is stored in memory while it takes a lot longer to read it from disk.

i have found electrum to use as alternative but read bitcoin core is the native wallet and have better features, benefits than wallet like electrum.

A full node (that would be bitcoin core) offers you a lot more privacy compared to an SPV node (that would be electrum) and small security. Otherwise electrum offers far more features as a "wallet" than bitcoin core does and it is a lot easier to use.

[NotATether]

it just has got 9% of the blockchain in total. why is this slow as hell?

From what I've seen you can improve performance by:

• Using SSD instead of HDD
• Having 16 GB RAM
• Setting dbcache (database cache) to 4096
• Using Linux instead of Windows (I've never tested Windows myself)
• Having a fast CPU if that becomes the new bottleneck
• Enough bandwidth tot download 350 GB in a few hours

Bandwidth speed won't usually be the bottleneck because from my experience the downloads are done in bursts of a few megabits/second, and my node has a 1Gbps line.

Server processors such as Intel Xeons are usually good for sustained CPU activity but when running an intense single-threaded task like syncing, high-end consumer CPUs are faster because they can do busts of around 4.something GHz before reverting to about 2.x or 1.x GHz speeds, while server CPUs usually only run at a constant 2.x GHz clock rate.

My node has 16GB of RAM although I have almost never seen Core use more than 2GB at once. I can't speak for Linux vs Windows but the Windows build is compiled with MinGW gcc which does not know anything about optimizations used in Windows' compiler (msbuild). But the Linux version wouldn't be much different anyway.

CPU, hard disk and RAM are really the only major bottlenecks in syncing. Also check the RAM access speed, because older DDR2 and DDR3 sticks have slower access times than modern DDR4 sticks.

(By the way, wouldn't it be more efficient if Core downloaded blocks during the sync using multiple threads, since that can be parallelized safely?)

[ranochigo]

(By the way, wouldn't it be more efficient if Core downloaded blocks during the sync using multiple threads, since that can be parallelized safely?)

It does. The Bitcoin Core does simultaneous download from different peers since 0.10.0 since they introduced headers-first synchronization. Synchronization before that was notoriously slow.
The bulk of the earlier blocks should synchronize relatively quickly (due to smaller blocks + assumevalid) and will slow down significantly in blocks from the recent years. If OP runs Bitcoin Core and only synchronizes 9%, it would be a fairly painful process. The assumevalid block is fairly recent already. Switching to SPV will be better.

[LoyceV]

Bandwidth speed won't usually be the bottleneck because from my experience the downloads are done in bursts of a few megabits/second, and my node has a 1Gbps line.

Server processors such as Intel Xeons are usually good for sustained CPU activity but when running an intense single-threaded task like syncing

I'd say "it depends": I've seen my bandwidth maxed out during the first part of syncing, and I've seen my CPU-cores maxed out later on. I'm pretty sure Bitcoin Core does multithreading. If you fixed one bottleneck, something else becomes the new bottleneck.

My node has 16GB of RAM although I have almost never seen Core use more than 2GB at once.

It won't use it on it's own, unless you manuall increase dbcache.