Just got an Umbrel, and installed Bitcoin Core from the app store. How long should I expect the blockchain sync to take?
For info, it’s at 21% after about 4 hours, but it shows 467,449 of 846,418 blocks, so I’m guessing there are more steps after the blocks hit the max? (since it’s halfway done – not a fifth done).
Thanks.
The time to sync will vary depending on network connection, disk speeds, etc.
But to reassure you- your sync seems to be going as expected. It does generally take a long time to sync the blockchain. The total size of the full blockchain is somewhere around 800GB last I checked, so essentially what your Umbrel is doing is downloading all 800GB of block data and validating that those blocks are legit.
There is no central repository either for you to download the blockchain from- if you are familiar with torrenting or other peer-to-peer software, it is similar, you are downloading the blockchain from your peers in the bitcoin network (i.e other computers running bitcoin who already have fully synced blockchains)
So the number of peers you have will also impact who quickly the sync goes.
TLDR; Everything is fine, have patience, its takes awhile.
On this topic. It seems that the number of peers is fluctuating quite often. At one moment there can be 12 connections and just a few minutes later it can be zero. What explains this?
It seems to me nodes are seldom turned off. And there are many of them. I’d expect quite a stable amount of connections at all time.
Cheers!
Thanks for the response. This morning it’s at 76% (767,985 of 846,488 blocks), so it’s moving along.
I synced the blockchain last year on an older Windows 10 laptop, and it took a full week! This is all on the same home network, so I’m guessing it’s going faster now with the Umbrel because of increased memory and faster CPU’s.
All synched up, so took about a day and a half. Not bad at all!
Wow, did it take a day and a half to sync the full chain? It took mine exactly 7 days. First 60% took just one day. It took 6 for the the remaining 40%. As if it became exponentially slower towards the end. All resources were fully available and were never maxxed out. The only thing that stood out was the limited and fluctuating amount of connections.
Now that is is fully synched the connections seems stable at around 12 peers. As if during sync connections were dropping off. Like you can only download a limited amount from one peer after which it drops the connection. Some kind of logic like that.
That sounds like the behavior I experienced downloading the blockchain on my Windows 10 laptop. Was trucking along for the first day, and then choked the next six. But my laptop is older with a slow CPU, and not that much memory. As I mentioned earlier, both the laptop and my new Umbrel are on the same network, so was most likely the difference in hardware. I’m surprised your Umbrel took so long. What are its hardware specs?
On my Pi5 and 2T NVMe SSD over ethernet, it took pretty much exactly 12 hours.