Original Bitcoin client is painfully slow

[minerguy]

Ok, I'm fairly new to Bitcoin and I have a question about the original Bitcoin client.
Is it normal that it takes days to initially download the blockchain when you first start the Bitcoin client.
The first 100000 Blocks downloaded fairly "quick" (took some hours though). But now I'm getting only about one or two blocks per minute?
Is this normal behaviour?
Btw. I'm using Windows XP, but my computer is fairly decent 4 Gigs of RAM and 3 Ghz Quadcore.
Thanks.

[swissmate]

Yep, it's normal

[minerguy]

Ok thanks, is there any explanation for this behaviour? Alternative Clients like multibit don't seem to have that problem.

[Bitsky]

The download itself wouldn't be the real issue here (for now), but what takes time is the verification of every transaction.
You could instead fetch a nightly snapshot of the blockchain and start your client with -rescan to get close to the current block count.

There's some more info on the forum about this:
eg https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84128.0
and of course my recent thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84177.0

[Raoul Duke]

There is no need to do -rescan anymore. It's done automatically if the blkindex.dat is missing or if you change the wallet.dat. Or at least that's what I was told

[minerguy]

The download itself wouldn't be the real issue here (for now), but what takes time is the verification of every transaction.
You could instead fetch a nightly snapshot of the blockchain and start your client with -rescan to get close to the current block count.

There's some more info on the forum about this:
eg https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84128.0
and of course my recent thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84177.0

Thanks, I will try that, at the current speed it will take me weeks to download the whole blockchain

[forsight]

Shouldn't take that long, I can grab it in an hour or two if I have to download the entire chain. Maybe find someone who has uploaded a somewhat current chain somewhere and download it normally.

[Gabi]

C'mon guys, the problem is not the download speed

The problem is verifying the blocks. Check how much your hard disk is working, it's checking everything and it is the bottleneck.

On a SSD it would be much more faster

[Faisal7]

this brings up another problem with bitcoin, it's too technical and that puts people off believe it or not.

[deepceleron]

Relevant thread:

Howto: New Bitcoin installation? Slow block downloading? Missing transactions?

[casascius]

Get a good headstart on the block chain here

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/

[ludo0777]

Ok, I'm fairly new to Bitcoin and I have a question about the original Bitcoin client.
Is it normal that it takes days to initially download the blockchain when you first start the Bitcoin client.
The first 100000 Blocks downloaded fairly "quick" (took some hours though). But now I'm getting only about one or two blocks per minute?
Is this normal behaviour?
Btw. I'm using Windows XP, but my computer is fairly decent 4 Gigs of RAM and 3 Ghz Quadcore.
Thanks.

It does take ages, but it is worth it

[nimda]

For small amounts of BTC and an inexperienced user (perhaps the "put-off" users), an online wallet like the one provided by blockchain.info may be better. No downloading, no verifying, no wallet.dat stealers, accessible anywhere, and you can still send your large amounts to offline storage.

[minerguy]

Thanks again for all the help.

[Faisal7]

For small amounts of BTC and an inexperienced user (perhaps the "put-off" users), an online wallet like the one provided by blockchain.info may be better. No downloading, no verifying, no wallet.dat stealers, accessible anywhere, and you can still send your large amounts to offline storage.

yeah I just created mine. now I'm more comfortable using these stupid fucking Bitcoins.