Quote from: Xunie on July 12, 2010, 05:39:05 PM

Quote from: Mionione on July 12, 2010, 12:12:57 PM

First time i launched bitcoin i couldn't receive anything and hard drive ran intensively for hours. [...]
So if you have the same "problem" don't worry all is ok, you just have to wait.

Bitcoin "syncs" the file, so the file get's rewritten to the harddrive every time it gets a block, that's quite intensive.
Having a SSD hard drive right would really speed things up.

I first ran bitcoin (FTR, 0.3.13) on an old laptop, which has the HD swapped for some Compact Flash (i.e. cheapskate 2.5" SSD). It was absolutely terrible fetching the blockchain, sometimes fetching a couple of blocks a second and sometimes hanging (for an hour? I forget) on one block number. I thought maybe I was getting duff data.

After 24 hours and still only 65k of 90k blocks fetched, I came up to see what was going on and saw the HD light on permanently; ran strace (output available on request, at least for a while) and realised it was the syncs that killed it. I stopped it, moved ~/.bitcoin to /dev/shm with a symlink back and it flew through the rest pretty quick. (Beware, /dev/shm is temporary as in machine crash --> wallet gone.)

Is this a good place? to suggest that, If the data came off the network and you can get it again just for the asking, maybe you don't have to sync immediately; but could wait five seconds to see if there is more coming. Of course if the user inputs a new transaction, sync right away.

(sorry to dredge an old one, but this is where the comment seems to fit.)