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Showing 6 of 6 results by 28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Starting a NODE
by
28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
on 03/09/2025, 20:04:02 UTC
About Raspberry Pi 4 (with 8 GB RAM and 2 TB USB SSD storage), what I can say is that for the initial download it is not enough. I am going through this as I write. I was doing it with a Pi 4, it went well until around 2022, then it became super slow. Now I am finishing the download on a very powerful PC and it is going quite fast, it should finish tomorrow probably. Once it finishes I will try to run the node on the Pi 4 and see how it goes.
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Initial block download drastically slowed down
by
28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
on 02/09/2025, 16:03:29 UTC
I am curious, if I may ask, why is it so memory hungry? From my limited understanding, while downloading the blockchain it is also validating it. This has to be done one block at a time, because of the nature of the blockchain itself (I guess I can validate a random block, but at some point I will need a hash of the previous, which I must check is valid before I can say this one is valid). If each block weights 1 MB, then how are we needing > 8 GB?
Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Initial block download drastically slowed down
by
28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
on 02/09/2025, 05:34:33 UTC
I left `bitcoind` running for some hours in a very powerful machine and can confirm that now it is going very fast again, so the bottleneck is something in the Raspberry Pi.

In the powerful machine I am running it with the default settings, i.e. no bitcoin.conf, except for `-datadir` which I point to the USB storage SSD. In this powerful machine, `pmap` reports a total memory usage of `bitcoind` of about 14e9. It seems that 8 GB of RAM is at least in part responsible for the bottleneck, no matter what you put in `dbcache`.
Post was edited
 6 days ago (view)
Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Initial block download drastically slowed down
by
28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
on 01/09/2025, 20:31:33 UTC
Thank you for your comments. I have `dbcache=4096`. I still have
Code:
$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.6Gi       280Mi        85Mi       4.0Ki       7.4Gi       7.4Gi
Swap:          511Mi       337Mi       174Mi
[/ode]
and `top` is:
[code]
top - 21:26:42 up  1:02,  1 user,  load average: 1.11, 1.14, 1.38
Tasks: 172 total,   1 running, 171 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.3 us,  4.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 67.8 id, 27.8 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   7809.4 total,     78.1 free,    278.7 used,   7574.2 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:    512.0 total,    174.5 free,    337.5 used.   7530.8 avail Mem

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                                 
    742 btcusr    20   0 9912.5m 881320 833248 S   6.9  11.0  11:42.52 bitcoind
which makes me think that the RAM is not the bottleneck.

@ABCbits what is ZRAM? [/code]
Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Initial block download drastically slowed down
by
28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
on 31/08/2025, 21:39:23 UTC
It has 8 GB of RAM.

```
$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.6Gi       452Mi        79Mi       456Ki       7.2Gi       7.2Gi
Swap:          511Mi       324Mi       187Mi
```
Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Topic OP
Initial block download drastically slowed down
by
28e7166c23e70c2014feb5d64
on 31/08/2025, 20:01:02 UTC
I am attempting to run a bitcoin node for the first time. I downloaded bitcoin core from the official website. I am running `bitcoind` in a Raspberry Pi 4 which has a Samsung T7 with approximately 220 GB still free (checked 2 minutes ago). I started downloading the blockchain on August 17, exactly 2 weeks ago. The first 10 or so days it was downloading about half a year of blockchain per day, and roughly constant speed. However, since the last 3-4 days this drastically slowed down, and now it downloads about one or two days of blockchain per day. At this rate, I will need like one more year to complete the initial download, instead of a few more days as with the initial download rate. There seems to be no error, it just became very slow. Is this normal?