Downloading bitcoin core for the first time and progress has slowed to 0.05%

[offnr]

Bitcoin Core downloaded the blockchain to 87% progress overnight, but in the morning the download speed has decreased dramatically, with the progress increase per hour as 0.05%. nothing has changed on my laptop. what could be causing this?

i installed bitcoin core on this external hdd rather than setting the datadir to it. would that have mattered here?

[nc50lc]

Your node must have gotten to the point where it's now validating everything in the new blocks that it download from its peers after reaching its version's default "assumedvalid" block.
But 0.05% per hour is tad too slow, are you using an HDD?
If so, don't rely on the estimation too much since it's tend to underestimate the speed specially with slow disk and low dbcache.

What are your settings and specs?

i installed bitcoin core on this external hdd rather than setting the datadir to it. would that have mattered here?

The binary's directory doesn't affect your overall sync speed.
What matters is if you've put the datadir in that external HDD as well, if so, that's also contributing to the issue.

[LoyceV]

what could be causing this?

Usually: lack of RAM. If it's <16 GB: add more RAM. Increase dbcache. If you put blocks on an external disk, at least keep chainstate on a local disk (SSD).

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

Bitcoin Core downloaded the blockchain to 87% progress overnight, but in the morning the download speed has decreased dramatically, with the progress increase per hour as 0.05%. nothing has changed on my laptop. what could be causing this?

i installed bitcoin core on this external hdd rather than setting the datadir to it. would that have mattered here?

With HDD, I can imagine how you can quickly sync your Bitcoin Core full node from 0% to 87% within a day, overnight. It takes some days to sync your nodes to 87% and since Taproot, Ordinals BRC20 tokens in early months of 2023, there are more transactions in each block that can affect your synchronization progress.

Increase your RAM, much cheaper to upgrade, then if possible upgrade your HDD to SSD.

Ordinal Theory and the Rise of Bitcoin Inscriptions
The emergence of Ordinals[url]

[Bratislava]

you wrote that you are using an external HDD this will be the issue. and as the other wrote before the first part of the core is going fast but to the end it slows down.
I was also using an external HDD connected over USB and it was terrible then I tried NVMe disk and the full core was downloaded and validated in less than 20 hours.