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The first hour may had been spent discovering peers, syncing "block headers", then the first few blocks.
Normally it should be finished in a few minutes but if you keep on getting slow peers and limited to 11 (when no inbound peers), that could take a while.

Actually when I said the first hour it is because I track from a crontab job each hour and before the first 'full' hour there was actually about 1/2 hour.

Still continuing to plug along, now at 74.59 doing just over 1% per hour.

However another symptom of the system hardware being maxed out is now to do anything on the system I need to temporarily shutdown the bitcoind process.

So will report back after new hardware arrives and is set up.

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That's more than sufficient to do a quick download.

This was at the upper end of my hardware search, I am a bit annoyed I can't really find anything without windows on it, but so be it. I would build one but for itx mini pc that looks like it is not fun.

Thanks for all help + suggestions.