I was wondering why synchronizing with the blockchain is bottlenecked so badly by I/O requests? There's plenty of free RAM, and the entire blockchain could easily fit in there, yet the client is "only" using 160MB of RAM at the moment, less than 3% average CPU time and some minor network usage spikes well below my maximum throughput with a well connected client (36 active connections at the moment). Disk usage is constantly pegged to 100% usage, and the harddisk activity is easily heard. With a good internet connection, it should be entirely possible to move the bottleneck to the CPU, resulting in much better synchronizing speeds. Are there any plans on improving caching mechanics?
Alternative clients aren't very well known yet, and people wanting to try out Bitcoin could easily be put off by the bad synchronizing speeds. People wanting to give bitcoin a try would in 99% of the cases use the regular client. People wanting to give it a shot out of curiosity won't like having to wait for literally hours before it catches up, leaving them with a relatively unusable computer in the meantime, as the disk activity makes the computer respond really slow compared to having 1 core pegged to 100% CPU usage.
I really think this is an important area to improve the client in. Thoughts/comments?
