Very slow sync on low end PC - what to upgrade?

Question

[Hi, I have to re-ask this question because I cannot recover my account from the last one. Sorry about that.]

I am a newbie to bitcoin. I am trying to sync a full node on my low end PC: 2g RAM, dual-core 2ghz, 250 gb regular HDD. Fresh install Linux. It is in pruned mode. The internet connection tests at 5mb download/1mb upload speed. The initial 15% synced in a few days but now the process is fluctuating wildly around 2-7 weeks. It's been on for a month & is only at 35% right now... Suffice to say it is very slow.

My main questions are: how much will adding some RAM improve the syncing speed? And will adding new RAM reset the blockchain download? Also, I have heard repeatedly that using a SSD HD will help. Is there a way to carry over my present 35% progress onto the SSD, or do I have to re-start the process?

I have already adjusted these settings: dbcache=900, banscore=10, listen=0, server=1 (upnp=0 also shows up on the bitcoin core gui/options, but not in the config file.). I don't really understand what these settings do, I am just going off recommendations. So hopefully they are good(?).

I am worried that putting in the RAM will "reset" the blockchain download and I will have to start syncing from 0% again. This already happened to me when I was tinkering with the dbcache setting - Which I will have to do again in order to take advantage of any new RAM. (right?)

Anyway I hope that was coherent. Any response is very appreciated. :)

Answer 1

Probably you are limited by slow hard drive. Even if you're pruning, the hard drive is still accessed. That means you should get a SSD hard drive.

There's a tool on Linux called iostat you can use to see where your computer is spending the most time.

iostat -y 1  # will repeat at 1 second intervals

If your operating system is installed on the non-SSD, then you probably will want to move that also, because operating systems read and write files while they work. For transferring the bitcoin sync progress you basically just need to copy the .bitcoin directory in your home folder, assuming you're on a Linux computer. Probably same for Windows but the directory location is going to be somewhat different.

Answer 2

Increasing the computer's memory will not speed up the process.

You can copy the bitcoin directory to another disk, install bitcoin core and it will continue from where you already downloaded. On a Linux system it's on $HOME/.bitcoin

To carry data in the safest way I would use rsync:

$ rsync -avhSP /home/user/.bitcoin/ /mnt/external_disk/home/user/.bitcoin/