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I am running the standard client on a micro Amazon EC2 instance. When I am synchronising Bitcoin with the network, it uses about 50% of the available CPU. After it is fully synchronised, I leave it alone and it cranks up to 100% by itself.

What can be causing the standard client to behave in this manner? Is it due to possibly high transaction volume, sharing information with peers, or perhaps something else?

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During synchronization, especially on virtual hardware, most of the time is spent on waiting for I/O, not verification. This will likely change in 0.8 (LevelDB does a better job minizing I/O). – Pieter Wuille Nov 10 '12 at 13:58
How many connections does it have? i.e, are there a bunch of peers pulling from you? Does limiting it to only 8 (i.e., disable incoming or -maxconnections) change the behavior? – Stephen Gornick Nov 10 '12 at 20:15
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@StephenGornick Initially I thought it was the peers to, but I closed my port 8333 and it was still doing that. I'm guessing it might be caused by Bitcoin memory leakage building up over time and Amazon limiting the CPU cycles for micro instances. After a full system restart the problem appears to have gone away for now. – ThePiachu Nov 10 '12 at 20:49
Running bitcoin-qt 0.8.1 on non-virtualised hardware and when synchronised and otherwise idle it still pegs all cpus it can find. Not good. – user3786 Apr 1 at 20:41

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