Love Armory but will be, unfortunately, switching to Electrum today.
Been waiting now for close on an hour now for Bitcoin Core to update the last 80 odd blocks.
I'm not a frequent user meaning that I often have a couple of hundred blocks to update when I open Armory. My ISP seems to be seriously trotting P2P traffic due to torrent downloads and this seems to have a direct effect on the updating of Armory/Bitcoin Core as the updating takes ages, even if just a hundred blocks.
I understand that this is no fault attributable to Armory so actually sad as I loved it but these updates are killing me. Would love to see a Armory 'thin client' in the future even if a scaled down version used only to do quick checks.
Who knows how long it will be, but I know that Core is going to eventually implement parallel downloading of blocks. The problem right now is that Core only downloads from one peer at a time, and if that peer happens to be slow, it takes forever. It's an epic weakness in a program that requires handling many gigabytes of data, and they apparently have a test branch that solves it. But I don't know how long it will be before that is released. When they finish that, we will remove the torrent feature from Armory, as the new Core feature will essentially obsolete the benefits of a separate tor downloader (gmaxwell has written about being able to saturate his bandwidth with the new parallel downloader). Until then, I'm not sure there's much we can do. I appreciate that you understand it's not directly attributable to use, and maybe when they get that in there, catching up won't be so difficult anymore.
On the other hand, I just leave Armory running. Can use File-->Minimize to keep it hidden. It shouldn't require much in terms of resources, and then is instantly available whenever you need it. But I understand not everyone wants to do that (or might be resource-limited)
