Ethereum wallet slow sync

[porina]

Thought I'd move my wallet install to a more secure machine than the one it is currently on. The "new" machine has a Celeron G1610T (2C2T 2.3 GHz), WD Green 2TB HD, 8GB ECC ram, running Win7 64. I installed the same software as on my other system from https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases, imported my key or whatever it is called, and let it sync. Over a day later, it is still going. I did restart it once earlier.

 

 

The old system has a SSD in it, so maybe that helps it sync faster, but I was also concerned about the write load on it. Look at the new install stats above, in ~30h there has been a total of over 550GB writes to the disk. I can't say for sure it is the Ethereum client, but nothing else should be doing much.

 

Is this typical for the spec system?

[r4tch3t]

Is downloading the blockchain, it's currently around 40gb.

It needs it to be able to run the operations and gets bigger over time. Bit coin is like 150gb

[porina]

1 minute ago, r4tch3t said:

Is downloading the blockchain, it's currently around 40gb.

It needs it to be able to run the operations and gets bigger over time. Bit coin is like 150gb

The system crashed not long after I took the above screenshot. I had opened up some extra software just to remind myself what hardware I have in it, maybe it really didn't like something.

 

Anyway, on restart, it seems to be progressing somewhat again. I just looked at the Ethereum folder, it is currently 46.6 GB! All the more reason not to keep it on the SSD in the other system...

 

Still, don't tell me I might want more hardware just to run the wallet... maybe I could use the dual Xeon, 32 GB of ram and SSHD... again, I'm concerned about this destroying write life on SSDs.

[Dark]

4 hours ago, porina said:

Still, don't tell me I might want more hardware just to run the wallet... maybe I could use the dual Xeon, 32 GB of ram and SSHD... again, I'm concerned about this destroying write life on SSDs.

Won't make much of a difference.  I run a VM on my server just for 'core' wallets and besides a hefty chunk of disk usage, compute and memory are barely touched. (it has 4vpu and 8GB of ram).

 

Unless you're on early SSD technology, I wouldn't be concerned about write life.  I'm not....

[porina]

6 hours ago, Dark said:

Unless you're on early SSD technology, I wouldn't be concerned about write life.  I'm not....

Bit of a difference between a 960 Pro and whatever I found cheapest at the time. I think the original system has a Kingston SSDNow 240GB in it, so the wallet would have resulted in over 2 disk passes worth. It might be that after the initial download the activity settles down. Since the restart I've only logged tens of GB of writes. It's within a couple hundred blocks of syncing now, but seems to be bogged down on getting chain data.

[porina]

It is still running, and I give it a restart every day or so. The number of blocks synced goes up, but I think the number of blocks it needs to sync might be going up faster! If I fire up resource monitor, the disk is mostly maxed out! I'm starting to wonder if it is even possible to complete a sync with a not that slow, but not that fast hard disk. I'm not sure it can keep up.

[porina]

I give up... it is never going to sync on that HD system. The time to download each block varied from tens of seconds to a minute. I'm pretty certain that was longer than the time it takes for the network to create blocks. After running for 10 days it was no closer to finishing with 1.6 TB both read and written to the HD. I even tried tricks I saw elsewhere like manually setting cache sizes. Now back to the original SSD system I originally set it up on, it is downloading a block every 8 seconds or so. Much better. If the wallet needs a SSD to run, that'll not help adoption... but I'm going to have to monitor wear rate very closely.

[porina]

After giving up previously, I went back to a SSD system to keep the wallet in sync. This was fine until the blockchain data filled the SSD. It hit around 160GB... excessive much? I moved it to a HD on the same system and put a pointer in place so it worked seamlessly, but I was back to the old problem. The block sync rate to HD was slower than the rate new blocks were being created.

 

After some poking around, I found the "lite" beta client option and enabled it. Left it to run overnight and was happy to find it has finished syncing by morning. I haven't gone back to check how much storage is required, but that it worked at all is the main thing. This would go a long way to making it more friendly so I hope to see it the default option in future, presumably after it leaves beta.

[Guest]

On 1/18/2018 at 1:15 AM, porina said:

I give up... it is never going to sync on that HD system. 

Yeah i read somewhere that nowadays it is impossible to sync ethereum wallet on a hdd, because the hdd is too slow for that.

[porina]

19 minutes ago, Almostbauws said:

Yeah i read somewhere that nowadays it is impossible to sync ethereum wallet on a hdd, because the hdd is too slow for that.

Not as a full node, but as said, I did successfully sync on HD as a lite node. Don't know what the difference is, but it'll do.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, porina said:

Not as a full node, but as said, I did successfully sync on HD as a lite node. Don't know what the difference is, but it'll do.

Lite only downloads only relevant parts of the blockchain, while full downloads all of it.

[vanished]

The blockchain has become huge... over 100 GB last I checked and that was long enough ago that it wouldn't surprise me if it was double that by now.  This will take a long time to download, and will put a large load on your drive.  In particular I found the performance on an SSD was substantially better than with it on a HDD, but I can understand being concerned about writes.

[porina]

49 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

The blockchain has become huge... over 100 GB last I checked and that was long enough ago that it wouldn't surprise me if it was double that by now.  This will take a long time to download, and will put a large load on your drive.  In particular I found the performance on an SSD was substantially better than with it on a HDD, but I can understand being concerned about writes.

Chaindata folder hit 154GB when my SSD filled up so it is somewhere above that. Litechaindata is 2GB. Much better SSD is a cheap Kingston 240GB, still showing 96% life remaining. So my concerns on life don't seem to have hit it much.

 

I think that is one of the problems with current bigger blockchains... imagine if it were more popular, the full dataset will get stupidly huge and few could or want to run a full node.

[Jumper118]

i got to 280gb on my ssd before it cant download it as fast as it was growing even on the ssd i havent opened my wallet for months now.