Topic: Blocks packaged into zips for new Windows and Linux clients for convenience (Read 11237 times)

It's Disk related for sure.

I had a server that was about 5 years old, but had one of those 10,000RPM SCSI arrays in it. CPU wise, it was about close to a PIV @ 2GHz (single core) with low FSB speed, etc. But when it started to download blocks, it was getting them faster than any PC I had seen before. The disk array was lit up like a Christmas display and it finished off 65k blocks in under a minute. So I knew then it was not so much the CPU or RAM, but the disk speed (or caching perhaps?) that seems to make the difference in that "first time" block download.

I'm not certain that accounts for the very slow startup.

I set up bitcoin on a new (relatively fast) computer, connected by gigabit ethernet to another running machine, and -connect= to send it directly to that node.

It still took a really long time to bring the blocks over.  It would pause for a long time at 501, 1001, etc.  Every 500 blocks would have a long pause before starting again.

I'm just questioning whether it's all disk and CPU bandwidth constraints, or if there's something in the system that injects pauses or timeouts.

They do, but the PC has to verify each along the way. On slower computers, this could take hours. The zips already have a snapshot of verified blocks to save you some time downloading and verifying each block. Your PC will still have to catch up to the network, but this will give it a head start so new users can be up and running more quickly if they find that it's taking a long time to get started. It's only benefit is for new installs. I did this because I find myself installing the client on a lot of computers and having some pre-downloaded blocks saves time and gets the client up and running, generating some coin quicker. 

Lastly, if it's useful for you or helps to save time, consider donating some coin to the cause in my sig 

the thing is that the initial blockchain download is quite slow for most of the users.
mostly because every block has to be verified first and i think if you download the whole blockchain as a file, only the last few blocks habe to be verified. but I'm not sure about this.

I apologize for the confusion, but don't the blocks get downloaded in a p2p fashion already? What is the benefit of torrenting it?

Well, to be technical, we are already using our own infrastructure. But we can change the way blocks are downloaded.

why use an external service with free user restriction when we can build our own infrastructure ?

Why not just upload the file itself to rapidshare?

I went ahead and added the torrent file to the web server as well. Maybe a little redundant, but it won't hurt. 

ok here's the torrent.
since i have no webspace and don't know a tracker without registration, i uploaded it to rapidshare, hope that's not a problem.

http://rapidshare.com/files/406964866/BitcoinBlocks.torrent.html


*seeding*

edit: yay the first peer

I had thought about that as well but wasn't sure how we would want to break the files for such a torrent etc. Though, anything will be helpful to get started.

ok, guess I will make a torrent to contribute here

just gimme a few mins, i'll be back soon

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking too. Even on a 100 megabit fiber, no network is invincible to a ton of people wanting to all download at the same time.

Maybe we want to torrent such a file ?
When the file becomes bigger and more and more users are loading bittorrent seems like a good way to handle the traffic and ensuring the availability of that file.

I could, got plenty of servers (would only take one though) available to task for that, at least for the Linux clients. I'm sure I could dig up a windows server to do the same thing, just zip up the blocks upload them to the FTP every hour or so. Can't help the Mac people I'm afraid, all of my Mac are PPC, don't have an Intel based one anywhere to generate with, sorry Mac gurus   

Thanks! This will help a ton for new users out there.

Is there any way someone could write a script that would automatically copy and package a new Zip file of the block chain every hour or so? It would be even faster for new users to try the system out.

Just as the subject says.

A lot of new users (or those that want to run multiple computers with the client) have to wait until the client syncs up with the rest of network before any transactions can take place (or coin generating).

So, for those technical people, I've packed up the bitcoin block into a zip file that has all of the blocks as of the time I created them just a few minutes ago. All this will do is save you some time on getting a fresh install of the client up to date with the rest of the network.

This is meant only for new installs, wouldn't recommend dumping this on top of an existing install that you've been running for a while (as they were extracted from new blanks). While it's just simple to dump this zip files on top of the bitcoin data folder, it's still a bit technical so I wouldn't recommend this for non-technical people.

This is merely for convenience and to help get new users up and running quicker. I'm sure the devs here probably already have something like this planned for the future, but until then I'm all for helping the community.

The download link is in my signature below, so if this helps to save you or your friends time, consider donating a few coins to the cause.  

[Edit]
Find files here: http://knightmb.dyndns.org/files/bitcoin/
and/or a Torrent File here (thanks to SmokeTooMuch): http://rapidshare.com/files/406964866/BitcoinBlocks.torrent.html