Blockchain download extremely slow at 200 blocks per hour

Question

I am running bitcoind and the blockchain download is very slow at 200 blocks per hour.

I am at 225146 and at the current speed, it would take bitcoind a month to catch up.

Here is my output from bitcoind getinfo

{
"version" : 32400,
"balance" : 0.00000000,
"blocks" : 225305,
"connections" : 5,
"proxy" : "",
"generate" : false,
"genproclimit" : -1,
"difficulty" : 4367876.00084220,
"hashespersec" : 0,
"testnet" : false,
"keypoololdest" : 1378312057,
"paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
"errors" : ""
}

CPU usage is at 10 Percent and I am using 50% of memory.

Any ideas why the download is so slow?

Answer 1

"version" : 32400

Oh my goodness. That is a very old version.

New versions dramatically improve chain synchronization times. Update from your current version of 0.3.24 to 0.8.5.

https://bitcoin.org

Answer 2

The synchronization process will not only download the blockchain, but also verify each block. Besides the computational effort, this generates a lot of disk accesses, so if you have a slow HDD, an encrypted disk, or are doing a lot of other i/o at the same time that might be your bottleneck.

See also here: How to increase the speed of synchronisation?

Edit: One might also want to check if bitcoind is up-to-date, the repositories of popular distributions can be lagging somewhat behind on fast developing projects.