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Author Topic: Blocks downloading very slow  (Read 1925 times)
bbulker (OP)
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May 04, 2011, 10:22:55 AM
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I've had Bitcoin open for over 48 hours and it is downloading the blocks extremely slow (currently at 86k). My download speed is >2MB/s. Is there any way to speed this up? At this rate it won't be downloaded for another 3 days.
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bbulker (OP)
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May 05, 2011, 12:25:55 AM
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This is really bugging me, I won't be able to use my wallet for quite some time.
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May 05, 2011, 12:45:01 AM
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The client downloads the old blockchain in sets of 500 blocks each, and then proceeds to hash-check everything in each of those blocks before proceeding to the next set.  So it's not neccessarily the speed of your Internet connection that is the limiting factor.  Are you using an old machine?

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

- Carroll Quigley, CFR member, mentor to Bill Clinton, from 'Tragedy And Hope'
bbulker (OP)
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May 05, 2011, 02:19:54 AM
 #4

I'm on a quad core 3.5 GHz with 8 GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM.

Does verification require a lot of disk I/O? I am running it on a flash drive that gets around 5 MB/s transfer rates.
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May 05, 2011, 03:42:41 AM
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Does verification require a lot of disk I/O? I am running it on a flash drive that gets around 5 MB/s transfer rates.

Yes, the initial hash-checking of the blockchain is also building a local database file that your client uses in the future to quickly find older transactions.  This takes massive amounts of disk I/O.  It would be better to bootstrap onto a regular hard disk and then copy the resulting database file and wallet.dat file to a new instance on a flash drive if you are looking to make it portable.  Ongoing updates are not as bad, but could still take a while over USB.

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

- Carroll Quigley, CFR member, mentor to Bill Clinton, from 'Tragedy And Hope'
gigabytecoin
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May 06, 2011, 07:51:54 PM
 #6

Does verification require a lot of disk I/O? I am running it on a flash drive that gets around 5 MB/s transfer rates.

Yes, the initial hash-checking of the blockchain is also building a local database file that your client uses in the future to quickly find older transactions.  This takes massive amounts of disk I/O.  It would be better to bootstrap onto a regular hard disk and then copy the resulting database file and wallet.dat file to a new instance on a flash drive if you are looking to make it portable.  Ongoing updates are not as bad, but could still take a while over USB.

Yes it could easily be your flash drive's transfer speed that is your bottle neck.

Try grabbing one of these babies.

They are about 6 times faster than your current usb drive, and for $25 you can't go wrong.
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May 06, 2011, 09:43:13 PM
 #7

If you are tech savvy you could create a ram-disc, copy the datadir to it and then start the client against it. This works especially well when you download a snapshot from one of the HTTP mirrors Smiley
Once your client has caught up you can stop the client, copy the updated datadir to the original datadir.

HTH,
cdecker

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