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I have been downloading the blockchain to a new client and it has been at it now for almost a week. One thing I notice is that as it is getting close to the end, it is slowing down a lot.

For example, it just downloaded 93 blocks in 488 seconds or 1 block per 5.25 seconds. If the entire block chain had downloaded at this speed then it would take: 418950 x 5.25 = 2,199,488 seconds or 25 days. Since, it has taken less than a week to do it, the older blocks must have downloaded faster.

What is the explanation for this?

Harry Pillsbury
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1 Answers1

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There are a few different factors for the synchronization time:

  • You're not only downloading data, but the data is also being validated. There is a lot of I/O going on. Disk speed is a significant factor.
  • The earlier blocks are much smaller than the later blocks. Validation time roughly scales linearly with the data size.
  • Complexity of transactions may have increased over time, transactions with more inputs take significantly more time to validate.
  • The UTXO database grows larger as you parse the blockchain, and every input for every transaction has to be looked up in the UTXO database.
Murch
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