I'm running on 4 year old hardware and only utilizing 3% CPU and 25% memory with the only constraint being downloading the blocks.
What about disk I/O? Disk I/O is usually a major bottleneck because Bitcoin Core constantly reads and writes from storage. The updating of the UTXO set during validation causes a lot of disk I/O and it can often end up being the bottleneck.
If you increase the
dbcache parameter, more of the database can be held in memory which improves the sync time.
Currently my sync time is pegged at 4 weeks but when I manually add clients it drops to 40 hours.
Did you measure that or is that what the estimate says?
There are not enough new nodes coming online for Pieter Wuille's explanation to make sense.
How do you know?
There is no reason someone should have to download the Blockchain via Bittorrent to speed syncing
Indeed, and that hasn't been the case for several years. The bootstrap.dat that you could download via torrent previously is no longer maintained and, at the time it was phased out, slower than allowing Bitcoin Core to sync by itself.