Wed Jun 29, 2016 2:49 pm

I'm building a new system and I think it will be interesting to see how long it takes for it to sync the entire block chain from start to finish.

The system specs are:

{snip}



Who want's to guess how long it will take for it to sync the entire blockchain from start to finish?

I'll gladly let everyone know once all the parts show up. I'll even test out the time lapse video feature of my iphone so everyone can see for themselves exactly how long it will take. I'm guessing it will just be a few hours.

The downloading of the blockchain has gotten quite a bit faster in the last year. There are still some bottlenecks left, though.Every block has a proof-of-work that gets checked. This is pretty cheap to check. But in many blocks every single transaction is also checked. This means that the transaction is checked for validity and that the signatures actually validate. This is much more expensive.In Bitcoin there is something called 'checkpoints' which mark a date after which all validation is done. Unfortunately this hasn't been updated for ages, so expect lots of CPU to be used...In Bitcoin Classic I added some code that automatically determines a checkpoint a week in the past, making validation much cheaper. But this change has not been released yet.There are some other issues, for instance the effective utilization of the CPU is pretty poor. Making it just take longer, whatever hardware you buy.Last; the UTXO database has a in-memory cache setting. It is set by default to a rather low value. For an initial sync I suggest a couple of GB, on your machine set it to the max of 16GB-dbcache=16384My guess would be that you can then complete it in 9 hours.