On startup its checking the last 288 blocks by default you can reduce the number of blocks with:
-checkblocks=<n>
and how thorough those blocks are checked with:
-checklevel=<n>
where n is an integer from 0 to 4 and 3 is the default setting.
At default settings it takes me about 20 minutes for the checking blocks stage. When I change to checklevel=1 the checking blocks stage takes only 2 seconds... So the question is how important is keeping the default setting. It seems I might not catch block database corruption at startup if I just use checklevel=1, so hard decision