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I¹ am trying to sync Bitcoin Core v24.0.1 on my Desktop with 16 GB RAM and an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, but it is taking forever even to get past the header synchronization. It tells me that it will take over 3.5 years to synchronize.

enter image description here

3 hours later, my node is still in Header Synchronization:
enter image description here

  • I have a decent internet connection and am connected to my router via wifi
  • I downloaded Bitcoin Core v24.0.1 from bitcoincore.org
  • I’m using an internal hard drive
  • I have ten connections, but have only received about 340 kB across my eight outbound connections in the past ~10 minutes minutes enter image description here
  • I have tried to add a few nodes from bitnodes.io via addnode <ip> onetry to perhaps learn about more peers (and the added nodes show up when I call getaddednodeinfo as past connections)
  • I have over 365 GB of free disk space

Update:

  • My node was already configured to run in pruning mode
  • I’ve increased my dbcache to 10 GB
  • My debug.log appears to show that I’m switching my peers frequently enter image description here

Any ideas what else I should try?

¹Asking for a friend.

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  • What has changed in the next few hours? Has the header synchronization finished? Has anything progressed?
    – Greg Tonoski
    Feb 15 at 9:00

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Without knowing your bitcoin.conf settings and debug.log, it is difficult to say. Generally speaking, however, here are a few things:

  • 365GB is not enough space, so you'll have to run in pruned mode or upgrade your hard drive
  • SSD drives tend to be much faster than HDD drives when performing IBD
  • dbcache is 450MiB by default. If you have 16GB of RAM available, you can set dbcache to a much higher value to help speed up IBD
  • If you are pruning, make sure to set your dbcache and prune values to be similar. If your prune value is lower than your dbcache value, your node will not use all the available memory. See Does pruning during IBD reduce the ability to utilize the dbcache fully? for more information

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, headers sync should not be taking 3 hours. Based on https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/26391 , it sounds like corrupted block data could be the cause. If you can confirm that by looking in your debug.log, restarting your node with -reindex is an option. However, it's difficult to recommend a solution without knowing what's in your debug.log first.

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  • 2
    That's good general advice, but i don't think using a SSD or increasing the dbcache applies here: it's apparently stuck at syncing headers.
    – Antoine Poinsot
    Feb 14 at 12:00
  • Ah, I missed the "3 hours" comment in the OP. Do you know how long headers sync should take normally?
    – josie
    Feb 14 at 12:55
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    A handful of minutes. :/ (Well, depend on the bandwidth but they disclaimed having a decent connection.)
    – Antoine Poinsot
    Feb 14 at 13:00
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Why not collecting and insepcting debug logs? There could be traces of the reasons that the node is synchornising slowly. Upload a debug.log file generated by Bitcoin Core started with the -debug option, i.e.

.\bitcoin-qt.exe -debug

3 hours of headers synchronisation doesn't seem to be slow to me.

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    The headers are less than 65 MB. Header Sync should take a few minutes.
    – Murch ♦
    Feb 14 at 13:57

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