I have been trying to do my initial blockchain download and it is taking longer than expected. Currently, it is at 76% at a block height of 827k. Calculating the number of blocks verified per hour, I get only 40 blocks per hour. It will take 84 more days to complete at this pace.
Most of the time the number of peers is at zero or one.
I am running a Raspberry pi 5 with 8GB of RAM. Connected over ethernet.
2TB SSD
Upload/Download speed test at over 100Mps
I previously enabled the “Make All Outgoing Connections to Clearnet Peers Over Tor” setting. It increased my number of peers but did not increase the speed of syncing. It is now disabled.
I have increased the dbcache to 4000 MiBs.
I have read that the RAM speed is a bottleneck area but the live usage of the CPU is always less than 10% and the RAM usage is only around 400Mb
I thought maybe the temperature of the SSD was causing it to slow down so I put several heatsinks on it and have a large fan blowing on it at all times.
I have same problem with 2000 MB cache ram and no other settings modified, but hardware is a PC with 16Gb Ram (same T7 samsung) and is working so slow (more or less always at 74%) there is a solution or only wait and be calm?
I am willing to be patient. However, I would feel reassured that others are experiencing this timeframe of over three months for the IBD. A friend of mine was able to the IDB in three weeks on a Mac mini with a 16Gb RAM.
I’m also interested in whether or not the number of peers contributes to the speed of the download. I assume that as long as there is one peer connection, the node is able to find and verify the past blocks. But does having ten or more peers speed up the process? The node can only download and verify the blocks in sequential order. The process has to be linear, right?
I also understand that the blocks mined in the last year are much “denser” and require more time and power to verify. Does that mean the closer the IBD gets to the current block the slower the rate of verification becomes? Will the time line of my synchronization asymptotically increase?
I ran into this same issue with the T7, been running at 100% for about a week now. Basically after trying countless different things over a few weeks time, gpt pointed me to the iowait time through htop and it pointed to the T7 as the culprit slowing things down. I basically synced the blockchain onto a different ssd using my MacBook, then transferred the files from that ssd to the T7 via the raspberry pi and I was up and running in a few days time.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Can I ask what RAM speed your Raspberry Pi and MacBook are?
Downloading the block to another SSD from a friend’s node seemed like another solution I could try. What did you need to do to get the blockchain file transferred to your Raspberry Pi? When I try to attach any hard drive from a Mac to my Raspberry Pi it won’t work. I guess they are not formatted the same? And I think I read that the Umbrel OS does not support external HD unless you have the Umbrel hardware itself.
I’m new to all this, so please correct me if I’m wrong.
