Bitcoin blockchain sync very slow on HDD - page 2.

philipma1957

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Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on July 06, 2024, 09:36:01 PM

Quote from: philipma1957 on June 24, 2024, 02:06:05 PM

In fact the second setup may be faster than the offered download speed.

I have used 200Mbps and
128gb ram
1tb nvme2 ssd
threadripper cpu

My setup was able to do 190Mbps constantly which makes me suspect my internet connection was my bottle neck

I will soon get 1gb internet and try to see how fast I can do this.

how much did that setup cost you? i'm guessing around $2500. most people would be better off just buying bitcoin instead of trying to spend that money to download the blockchain. it's just going to be an ever increasing game of having to throw more and more hardware at the problem big waste of money unless you just have that stuff lying around from something else...

that pc was the best i ever owned.

it was serious money the threadripper alone was 2500

you don’t need all that.

Any i5 intel 8500 or newer

16 gb better to have 32gb

and any good 2tb ssd. nmve 2

oh. 200. mh internet .

ABCbits

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on July 13, 2024, 02:44:37 PM

Quote from: ABCbits on June 25, 2024, 03:45:15 AM

Short answer, yes. Not only each block become bigger, total UTXO keep growing.

How do you know that the UTXO keeps growing? Are there stats that support this?

I run full node, so i could run gettxoutsetinfo "none" block_height to get such data. There are few website which monitor total UTXO such as,
https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/utxo-count
https://utxo-stats.com/

If you read discussion about IBD with Raspberry Pi or old device, you might notice people report about slow IBD due to low RAM.

nc50lc

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Quote from: broflof on July 06, 2024, 10:36:37 AM

At some point the GUI had stalled very badly, I could do nothing so I shut down Bitcoin-qt and it shut down cleanly.
-snip-
I don't know if the GUI would have recovered if I had waited for some more time. Maybe I tried to use it just at the critical moment. It's unknown for now.

That point must be after the specific block hash set here: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/c4d45b695ef27e21d35e886b08887e2ecf272ce7/src/kernel/chainparams.cpp#L108
But it should've recovered after it's finished with all the heavy signature script verifications.

Quote from: broflof

Finally, actually, I got "pro level" answers instead of just "works fine for me", "can u show ur logfiles", "just get SSD bruh". Tongue

Well, a "pro" will ask for the debug.log to look for the root of the issue instead of suggesting solutions that may not be necessary.
The reason why you're not asked for logs here is because slow sync is pretty much hardware and/or database cache issue
and the "dbcache" solution that you found is consistent in topics like this.

If you followed this format (sticky topic): [READ BEFORE POSTING] Tech Support Help Request Format
Someone pro can easily point that your ram and dbcache settings can be improved just from looking at the logs and the provided info.

BlackBoss_

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Rollbit is for you. Take $RLB token!

Quote from: LoyceV on July 13, 2024, 03:46:16 PM

The way I see it: Bitcoin gets more expensive, and more people own smaller and smaller bits of it.

It's natural that with a same cake, if there are more people know about the cake, want to have pieces of the cake, each will have smaller piece. People who have bitcoins need to take care of their bitcoins, hold their coins tightly and sit down to think of solid plans for investment, holding and personal, family financial plans.

They need very good plans to avoid of any situation that forces them to sell their bitcoins and turn their pieces to be smaller and smaller ones with time. They had chances to join the market earlier than late comers but if they don't have proper plans, they will end with no differences to late comers.

Bitcoin: Addresses Holding > X BTC by Year

LoyceV

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on July 13, 2024, 02:44:37 PM

How do you know that the UTXO keeps growing? Are there stats that support this?

I don't keep track of UTXOs, but I have data on funded addresses. Apart from small temporary reductions (usually due to consolidation at low fees), they're generally growing in number.
The way I see it: Bitcoin gets more expensive, and more people own smaller and smaller bits of it.

BlackHatCoiner

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Farewell, Leo

Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

It depends on the transactions. If the future transactions create more UTXO than spend, then it will be worse over time, yes.

Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

Or has the code quality of Bitcoin Core gone down?

I believe it's just your HDD. It's extremely slow to download and index all that information on an HDD. Have you tried SSD?

Quote from: ABCbits on June 25, 2024, 03:45:15 AM

Short answer, yes. Not only each block become bigger, total UTXO keep growing.

How do you know that the UTXO keeps growing? Are there stats that support this?

kevinteohuiwei

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I just got mine sync and its 660GB .... done in 5 days with a 3MBPS line on my phone data.
Just 16gb amd ryzen 9 7950 and 1tb ssd ext drive.

Yea, i did set the cache to 1800MB compare to originally 450MB. It does help. Even on my raspberry pi 5, i did sync it within 5 days on the same ext drive.

same core version 27.0. I think it could be the cache 450MB default setting. Try changing it and trying different setting. Hope it helps.

ABCbits

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Quote from: broflof on July 06, 2024, 10:36:37 AM

At some point the GUI had stalled very badly, I could do nothing so I shut down Bitcoin-qt and it shut down cleanly. When I restarted it the blockchain was in fully synced state. So my remaining 5 weeks were synced in 2 to 3 hours, much faster than before.

I don't know if the GUI would have recovered if I had waited for some more time. Maybe I tried to use it just at the critical moment. It's unknown for now.

Based on my experience, the GUI would be responsive again and show latest information. Although if you need to know latest sync progress, you could open debug.log and look for newest line which contain text "UpdateTip".

Quote from: broflof on July 06, 2024, 10:36:37 AM

Monero did not get faster than before and the last 50000 to 100000 blocks seem to be much slower than anything before. I didn't find any option similar to dbcache in Bitcoin. 600 blocks/h is the speed now. Used to be 2200 blocks/h for quite long. I benchmarked different file systems and certain types were occasionally faster than that but fell to the same slow level at some point.

Maybe it's SSD time next.

There are other parameter you could try, such as --block-sync-size, --fast-block-sync and --db-sync-mode. If you have question specifically about Monero, you should create new thread/reply on different board.

LoyceV

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Quote from: broflof on July 06, 2024, 10:36:37 AM

Monero did not get faster than before and the last 50000 to 100000 blocks seem to be much slower than anything before. I didn't find any option similar to dbcache in Bitcoin. 600 blocks/h is the speed now. Used to be 2200 blocks/h for quite long. I benchmarked different file systems and certain types were occasionally faster than that but fell to the same slow level at some point.

Maybe it's SSD time next.

Last time I synced Monero (on a server with 32 GB RAM, and HDD), the first thing it told me was to get a SSD. I couldn't do that, and eventually removed Monero because even after it was synced, the entire server felt "sluggish" while it was running.

larry_vw_1955

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Quote from: philipma1957 on June 24, 2024, 02:06:05 PM

In fact the second setup may be faster than the offered download speed.

I have used 200Mbps and
128gb ram
1tb nvme2 ssd
threadripper cpu

My setup was able to do 190Mbps constantly which makes me suspect my internet connection was my bottle neck

I will soon get 1gb internet and try to see how fast I can do this.

how much did that setup cost you? i'm guessing around $2500. most people would be better off just buying bitcoin instead of trying to spend that money to download the blockchain. it's just going to be an ever increasing game of having to throw more and more hardware at the problem big waste of money unless you just have that stuff lying around from something else...

broflof

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Thank you, for answers.

Finally, actually, I got "pro level" answers instead of just "works fine for me", "can u show ur logfiles", "just get SSD bruh". Tongue

I got a cheap RAM upgrade, set dbcache to 16GB (was 4GB or 6GB), started syncing.

At some point the GUI had stalled very badly, I could do nothing so I shut down Bitcoin-qt and it shut down cleanly. When I restarted it the blockchain was in fully synced state. So my remaining 5 weeks were synced in 2 to 3 hours, much faster than before.

I don't know if the GUI would have recovered if I had waited for some more time. Maybe I tried to use it just at the critical moment. It's unknown for now.

Monero did not get faster than before and the last 50000 to 100000 blocks seem to be much slower than anything before. I didn't find any option similar to dbcache in Bitcoin. 600 blocks/h is the speed now. Used to be 2200 blocks/h for quite long. I benchmarked different file systems and certain types were occasionally faster than that but fell to the same slow level at some point.

Maybe it's SSD time next.

ABCbits

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Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

Short answer, yes. Not only each block become bigger, total UTXO keep growing.

Edit: I assume "gets longer" refers to newer blocks.

Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

Or has something happened to the protocol so it would be harder now?

AFAIK no. New stuff (such as SegWit) solve few problem including quadratic verification time.

Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

Or has the code quality of Bitcoin Core gone down?

No. Jameson Lopp did benchmark which prove the opposite on https://blog.lopp.net/bitcoin-core-performance-evolution/.

Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

The GUI also stalls badly during sync. I don't remember when this problem began but it did not always exist.

That's true, it's known issue for few years. See this issue, https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui/issues/299.

philipma1957

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Activity: 4256

Merit: 8551

'The right to privacy matters'

a decent i5 gen cpu say i5 8500 or newer
a 1 tb samsung ssd or bigger
16gb ram or more
a decent internet connection say 100Mbps or more

if you have all of the above you will be under 1 day

obvious that

an i7 14700
a 2tb nvme2 quality ssd
64gb ram
and a 1Gbps internet

will be faster.

In fact the second setup may be faster than the offered download speed.

I have used 200Mbps and
128gb ram
1tb nvme2 ssd
threadripper cpu

My setup was able to do 190Mbps constantly which makes me suspect my internet connection was my bottle neck

I will soon get 1gb internet and try to see how fast I can do this.

LoyceV

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Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

CPU and net usage stay low most of the time, problem is not there (most likely). HDD usage is constant, I think that's probably the bottleneck. It's a 7200rpm standard desktop HDD.

You have 2 bottlenecks: RAM, and HDD speed. Both are more or less interchangeable: with 32 GB RAM and 12000 MB dbcache, your sync will go just fine. With 8 GB RAM and an SSD, the SSD is still the bottleneck. I tested both of these examples myself.

Quote

10 years ago I could sync the blockchain on a slow 5400rpm laptop HDD without major issues.

Ten years ago, the entire blockchain was only 20 GB.

Quote

Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

Yes. The chainstate directory keeps growing, and requires more and more RAM (or a LOT of disk activity) to verify the download.

Quote

Or has the code quality of Bitcoin Core gone down?

Nope. Older versions were much slower to sync.

Quote

Syncing monero is also extremely slow and it has been so as long as I can remember. But that's another story.

Monero is even more demanding than Bitcoin Core, despite a much smaller blockchain.

TL;DR: get an SSD.
If you have a small SSD, put the chainstate directory on it. That will make a huge difference for Bitcoin Core. If you don't have an SSD yet, buy one. Get a decent one for best performance. It's going to largely improve your entire computing experience.

un_rank

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- Jay -

Quote from: broflof on June 24, 2024, 10:54:41 AM

Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

Or has something happened to the protocol so it would be harder now?

It should, but the chain is not increasing as such a rate that will cause an significant lag in download time. Could be from the internet connection.

Nothing happened on the protocol level to make it harder either.

- Jay -

promise444c5

sr. member

Activity: 476

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Learning never stops!

In the last 10 years there're fewer transactions in a block... now there's more.
~~Use the current version check the latest news section of the forum for the torrent file,~~
Then if you are using bitcoin-qt GUI check the dbcache increase it, it could make it sync process more faster(note the value is in MB ) this should be done carefully in accordance to your ram capacity .

Quote

Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

Not really but yes and might depends on the hardware , people can still get it done in just 2~4 days.

Quote

The GUI also stalls badly during sync. I don't remember when this problem began but it did not always exist.

Sometimes when when block index is writing to disk you might experience that and you would think it's just stall

broflof

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I'm syncing my Bitcoin wallet blockchain using latest Bitcoin Core on Linux.

It progresses very very slowly, right now 2 to 3 weeks in 12 hours.

CPU and net usage stay low most of the time, problem is not there (most likely). HDD usage is constant, I think that's probably the bottleneck. It's a 7200rpm standard desktop HDD.

10 years ago I could sync the blockchain on a slow 5400rpm laptop HDD without major issues.

Time to buy big SSD perhaps.

But the interesting question is,
Does syncing get harder over time as the blockchain gets longer?

Or has something happened to the protocol so it would be harder now?

Or has the code quality of Bitcoin Core gone down?

The GUI also stalls badly during sync. I don't remember when this problem began but it did not always exist.

Syncing monero is also extremely slow and it has been so as long as I can remember. But that's another story.

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