Uhmm, if you have a shite router or network adapter, try using a cable instead and see if that increases download speeds. (It does for me)
Other than that, i don't think there's any other way to magically increase your UP/DOWN speed.
Thanks for the tip. Using a Gigabit Ethernet connection with a CAT-6e cable seems to have increased speeds by a long shot. I've been previously using WIFI to sync the Blockchain, but I guess that it's not ideal for quickly syncing Bitcoin Core. Since I have around 4GB of RAM available, I've set the -dbcache to a value of 2048 to see how further does Blockchain synchronization speeds increase.
Thanks for letting me know about this. I was unaware that "bootstrap.dat" was discontinued after using SPV wallets for a long time. I guess that I've been farther away from the latest developments of Bitcoin's full node implementation than I've thought. The "bootstrap.dat" was a great feature though, since you could easily backup the Blockchain data for use on another node.
As there is no other method to recur to, I'll be playing with "-dbcache" a bit along with a stable LAN connection via Ethernet while syncing. Hope that I could get back on track to support the Bitcoin network in the least time possible.
For quite some time - clearly more than a year - using bootstrap.dat was no longer faster than simply letting the wallet sync.
What you could do for speed would be wired internet connection, since usually it's more stable and faster than WiFi and having the data folder (even temporarily) on SSD.
Thank you. I've switched to a wired connection now, with gigabit speeds. The performance obtained is much better than with WIFI by a long shot. Greatly useful for faster synchronization times. Now, while I don't have any SSD yet, I could use a 256GB SSD which will be plenty for establishing a Bitcoin full node (at least for a while).
As AdolfinWolf pointed out, configuring the maxconnection has nothing to do with syncing the core faster. The syncing of core relies with the faster internet connection and the faster processing speed of your computer which runs the core. The downloading needs to be speeder and that can be achieved with a faster internet connection. Once the blockchain has downloaded, the wallet needs to process other outgoing transactions which needs the memory of your computer. Probably that can be configured by changing the dbcache value in the bitcoin.conf file.
-maxconnections are used for validating the created blocks and for checking the double spending. You can increase the maxconnections to the default 25 connections (i.e 8 outgoing and 17 incoming). It would help the network more and will allow you to contribute more to the network.
Thanks for the tip, mate! I will definitely keep this in mind when reconfiguring my full node. I've found out that most of my connections where blocked from the firewall I have installed (ZoneAlarm) so I had to disable it until I'm fully synced with the Blockchain. Now that I'm using a wired connection, and half of my RAM (2GB for dbcache) so things should speed up a bit.
@OP what do you use to store the database files and the blockchain? It is better to have the db in a internal storage rather than having them in external one.
Thank you for asking. I'm actually using an external HDD connected via a USB 3.0 port. I know that USB 3.0 is not as fast as a regular SATA port, but my options are limited since the internal HDD is very limited in space (64GB) which is not enough for downloading the full Blockchain. I'm running Windows 10 on it, so swapping the internal HDD is not an option at the moment.
Still though, if syncing doesn't get any faster, then I'll go ahead and buy a 256GB SSD. I could just clone the 64GB internal HDD into the new SSD in order to upgrade my node for the benefit of the Bitcoin Blockchain.
