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I am currently running bitcoind v0.16.0.0 on my macbook (osx 10.12.6) and the initial sync time is really slow. I'm syncing at roughly 88 blocks per hour which would mean it would take another 2 months to sync up.. In the activity monitor it looks like bitcoind is using only 3% of the CPU time. Could this be the issue? Is there any way to speed it up?

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Yes there is. The bottleneck is I/O speed and normal HD drives are really slow. You can move the chainstate directory (around 3GB) to an SSD. If your laptop doesn't have an SSD you can use an SSD thumb drive.

There are instruction how to do that in the wiki. I did that using an usb stick SSD and the whole chain synced in a liitle less than 12 hours.

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  • I moved the entire data directory to an SSD, resulting in a minor improvement at best. Interested in knowing what others have found.
    – Rich Apodaca
    Jun 6, 2018 at 20:09
  • @RichApodaca the data directory doesn't matter much. Did you move the chainstate dir?
    – Mike D
    Jun 6, 2018 at 23:33
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    I believe chainstate is a subdirectory of the data dir. I moved the entire data directory, so therefore the chainstate directory. No?
    – Rich Apodaca
    Jun 7, 2018 at 5:03
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The single most important change you can make is increasing the database cache. If you have enough memory, setting it to a few gigabytes can speed things up by a large factor.

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So I changed the location of the directory to my own HD instead of my external HD and increased the database cache. Now it runs like a charm. Thanks guys

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  • Thanks, I think you can update your question with this information
    – Freewind
    Dec 31, 2018 at 11:02

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