Okay guys
I've managed to produce a real bootstrap file. It has 1.434.234 blocks for pre-loading, which corresponds to 99.6% of the block chain.
To ensure everything is working fine, I'm testing the file locally. It's quite a heavy file:
729M /home/akira/bootstrap.dat
431M /home/akira/bootstrap.xz (compressed)A small observation shows that the wallet loads 2823 blocks per minute. This may very according to your configuration. I'm using 4x 250GB SATA-1 HDs in a RAID-5 configuration. Loading the 1434234 blocks will take at least 8.4 hours. I'm importing for 145 minutes already (409430 blocks). Over time, I think the average blocks/minute will slightly decrease, so it would be safe to state that loading the bootstrap file will take 10-12 hours. This still means a big gain compared to the severals days needed to do this using peer to peer connections.
While this file loads, you might see or not see the splash screen. The wallet GUI will not show until it's finished loading the whole shebang of data. It might look as if the program crashed. It does not crash or freeze and you should not kill the program to try to 'fix' it, nor try to play Battlefield 4 or something while loading. I don't know what effect this will have. Probably slowing down the loading, but it might occasionally crash it and you will have to start over again. So don't go clicking on the splash screen or tray icon either
On Linux you can decompress it using
tar -xJf bootstrap.xzWindows users can use 7-zip
OS X users: the same as Linux. If not, possibly by installing xz via "homebrew". Although, Yosemite should be able to handle it nowadays? OS X users who can confirm?
Unarchiver seems to be a popular solution too.
Anyway, I'll be back later (tonight) with an update and hopefully an initial download link. I was thinking
http://d-h.st/ or
http://www.filehosting.org/All suggestions and offers for hosting this are welcome. I don't know what service accepts big files without a cap on download volume. I have no FUP/unlimited internet volume, so I won't be able to seed it as a torrent or host it from home.
Also, you might have noticed that the block explorer is stuck?
I know about it and it's kinda derp why this happened: the VPS ran out of disk space. This also means that the DNS seed is nonoperational or at least not efficient at doing its job at this moment, for the same reason (>_<)p I'm looking for a new cost-effective solution to handle this. Might take some time though, to set up everything again an especially transferring the required data without having to load from scratch and get shutdown or kicked out by the providers due to too much CPU being hijacked from other user's services.
Update 1/3: 10 hours later: "height=915592" ... still 500k blocks to go.
Update 2/3: "height=1023745" 400k blocks left... 12 hours already. Yikes (>_<)
Time to sleep. The rest will be for tomorrow. Guess I'll find out now if the process can be 'interrupted' and resumed later.
Update 3/3: bootstrap.dat loading can easily be resumed. You just need to rename bootstrap.dat.old back to bootstrap.dat
The client will then skip all known blocks and resume where it left off.
In the meantime I am transferring files from the current saturated VPS (Dublin) to a brand new one (Dallas):
- 4 vCPU
- 6GB RAM
- 30 GB SSD
- 2TB Traffic
- 10gbps connection
The old one had
- 1 vCPU
- 1 GB RAM
- 10 GB SSD
- 1 TB Traffic
- 10 gbps connection
Last login: Mon Apr 27 18:51:29 2015 from 94-***-***-***
ubuntu@ip-***-***-***-***:~$ scp -r .Minerals/ akira@23.***.***.***:/home/akira
akira@23.***.***.***'s password:
Mineralsd.pid.old 100% 6 0.0KB/s 00:00
Minerals.conf 100% 394 0.4KB/s 00:00
log.0000000226 100% 10MB 5.0MB/s 00:02
wallet.dat 100% 80KB 80.0KB/s 00:00
blk0001.dat 43% 345MB 13.5MB/s 00:42 ETA
Damn connection
13.5MB/Sec. Sweet \(^_^)/
Also, I got an offloaded database of 20GB. The block explorer currently stores 4.1GB of transactions data. Let's say we're good for 2-2.5 years of data. How to transfer this data however, is going to be a tough nut to crack. A SQL dump, table by table propably... It will be kind of 'insane' to load it on the new location :3
In the meantime: 300k blocks left.