Bitcoin Core - Wallet question

[ijmolder93]

This may be a really noob questions, but why does the Bitcoin core 0.9.1 wallet take a lot longer to load in comparison to alt coin wallets? Litecoin also generally seems to take quite a bit to load, but most prominently the Bitcoin one.

[Waramp22]

The blockchain is much older and much more active with bitcoin, so you end up with longer loading times.

[Cryddit]

This may be a really noob questions, but why does the Bitcoin core 0.9.1 wallet take a lot longer to load in comparison to alt coin wallets? Litecoin also generally seems to take quite a bit to load, but most prominently the Bitcoin one.

Whenever you start the Bitcoin wallet it checks the Bitcoin blockchain.

There's a lot more of the bitcoin blockchain than there is of a typical altcoin blockchain.  It takes longer.

In principle, it could be optimized a lot.  In practice, it hasn't been.

[gmaxwell]

wallet take a lot longer to load

How long are you talking about? for me it takes about 15 seconds cold-cache.  Some systems with broken IDE controllers or crazy AV can take many minutes, but thats not Bitcoin's fault. There may be other system specific cases which could be improved.

(If you're just talking about the 15 seconds— it's as folks said here... it does some validation at startup to make sure the data isn't corrupted, otherwise you could end up on a fork during runtime if the data was corrupted.  Litecoin is additionally slow because its POW is very slow to verify.)

[byt411]

It "takes long to load" because it needs to download the newest blocks from the blockchain. Other clients don't need to do so, so they are much quicker.