Topic: BitCoinQT will NOT sync? (Read 1350 times)

Actually can move the bootstrap file to another location and just see if the client starts downloading automatically from the first blocks?  If it does then there is something with the boostrap file that's at issue.  If it does nothing then you know to dig further in connection/firewalls etc.

jsmackdown anything in your router firewall or on the pc firewall that could be blocking this?

New to bitcoin but curious to gain experience with it and having two Virtual Private Servers (both Linux Debian 'Squeeze' based) operational for other things, I have installed a bitcoin node on each of them.
My experiences:
No luck with the downloaded v 0.8.6. 32 bit binaries. Both VPSes have enough disk to hold the blockchain (for now) although it seems urgent to add functionality to bitcoind to prune and compact history to only essential bits.
One VPS has 1GB RAM, the other 500MG.
The 0.8.6 starts loading & checking blocks at a rapid pace but around block count 250.000 really does not advance anymore.
So on one, using a torrent client, downloaded bootstrap.dat, the 279k block version. This was a matter of 15 minutes for some 13G, demonstrating the very good internet connectivity of the VPS.
Located bootstrap.dat in the data directory, which in my installation is set in bitcoin.conf as it is not the default one.
I make bootcoind run as 'bootcoin' user and group and use a data directory accessible to that user and group.
That in itself works; a wallet is made there and all processes start seemingly normal. But after a day of two there is hardly further progress although the CPUs on the VPS are really busy.
It seems bootstrap.dat never got touched in the way intended. There may be path issues around that feature in the code. Tried various symbolic links to the bootstrap.dat file from other 'default' locations to the data directory
but this did not change anything. Also tried the 'loadblock' configuration parameter with the path to bootsstrap.dat. Could only conclude that this 0.8.6. binary was going nowhere on either server.

So downloaded the source code, 'bitcoin-master', version 0.999 and compiled that. Actually the compilation went fairly smooth on both VPSes after installing a few essential packages.
Noticed a remarkable size difference between the 0.8.6 (6.3 MB) downloaded bitcoind binary and the compiled 0.9.9 (46.1 MB) one.
Restarted bitcoind on basis of the 0.999 binaries, on both VPSes, with exactly the same configuration as before and both have re-accelerated getting and verifying blocks from where v 0.86 left it. After a day both reached sync without a need for bootstrap.dat.

The CPU on a VPS is very busy during the block chain build-up and checks. It can take a long time before any answer is given to commands via RPC. If you are not patient and break-off the commands that are waiting, or have a web interface to RPC that reaches a wait time limit, the number of threads available (4 in default set up) may easily be busy and effectively control is lost over bitcoind. Only killing bitcoind and restarting it via its startup script then restores control.
Bitcoind produces loads of debug info; a bit much to my taste and decided to send it to console with the setting in bitcoin.conf. In daemon mode that effectively gets rid of the debug logging.
Since having reached sync CPU cycles have much reduced and now both VPSes easily keep up with new transactions.
So in conclusion can recommend the more recent code when you have problems reaching sync.

Thank you wonderful community, you've been a great help

I'm sure bitcoin will fully take off with such wonderful helpful people helping people get set up with bitcoin.

I'm getting my grandma to sign up next week.

please help I am trying to set up armory cold storage and have been stuck on this for 2 weeks

hmm yea another 6 hours at 16 weeks left

any other ideas?

You could try to use bitcoin-qt.exe -dbcache=100 setting to increase the cache. That should speed things up a little. Default is 25.

Can someone please help me figuire this out? I am trying to set up cold storage with armory but I cannot fully do this until I get this sync'd

Ive used a torrent each time.

I just did a re-download of the torrent, fresh install and now I am stuck on 28 weeks syncing for the last 10 hours.

I am on an SSD, 100mbit, 16gb ram, win 64, so I dont think its my hardware/connection.

I'm going on 10 days trying to get this to work...

any other ideas??

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-bitcoin-blockchain-data-torrent-145386

Last time I did it, it took just about a week to download.  You can also run out of virtual memory while syncing for the first time, so if your machine is hitting the page file on a HDD it'll slow it down like mad.  Either use a SSD or make sure you've lots of memory on a 64-bit OS.

Try find and download all Blockchain on torrent or something like that...
I found somewhere whole blockchain on torrent... i cant right now find link, but i will write here when i find it.

Nope just my home network.

Are you behind a VPN?

So the last 5 lines or so of the debug are

2014-03-03 06:44:32 stored orphan tx 9bf45db312b477f3e5a39b181510f041cf4fdc0b5618ff9ee7f749f175a135d5 (mapsz 1041)
2014-03-03 06:44:33 stored orphan tx 950ed4f60fd636457dfed36e4d3facab616d11c4c88745ba62c2ab047ee8be2b (mapsz 1042)
2014-03-03 06:44:34 stored orphan tx 089663e6f42ba93ba040bc2b5ad2d3919855020039b61df3bcf16b849df2dfea (mapsz 1043)
2014-03-03 06:44:34 Added 1 addresses from 180.154.163.182: 403 tried, 14420 new
2014-03-03 06:44:36 stored orphan tx 6cb22426c06f3967b7f84cf691a8f6fe3d8ba900ef5c7f5f540cdd55f4557552 (mapsz 1044)
2014-03-03 06:44:39 stored orphan tx 8a964b371abbe997ae40b4e0cd80d5a5e5b0c0657b621c7ab733b511c7b4899a (mapsz 1045)

The time keeps advancing.  Does this mean that it is working just very slow?

Any fix? This will take a month two finish at this rate and I am trying to get armory working but I need this sync in order to do that

I got the torrent and loaded that portion via disk to speed things up... that part worked fine.

Once it got to 16 weeks behind it switched to "syncronizing" and I left it overnight (100mbit connection) and it is still at 16 now.

it says I have 30 connections and the debug log seems to be growing but I just dont get it.

Am I doing something wrong? Any way to get this working I've been trying different things the past week and cannot get it sync'd.