Ethereum node needs to sync, taking too long

[statsdroneadmin]

It's taking far too long for ethereum node to sync. I've been running my computer for at least half a day, internet speed is definitely not the issue. I'm at block 2,000,000 of 3,866,000 and the last 150,000 blocks have probably taken at least 6 hours. I've tried to find other users commenting on similar issues and the only thing I could find was reference to the system clock of the computer. I'm on a mac so I've manually edited it but it doesn't seem to do anything so it's automatically synced with time.apple.com.

System information

Version: `0.8.10`
OS & Version: osx
Node type: `eth/geth 1.6.5 (go)`

[OwlGreenApple]

yeah im agree, the developer needs to find a way to install this, this is really take too long

[statsdroneadmin]

It gets to the point where it downloads more blocks before it stalls and I have to usually force quit the app and restart it to get it going to download more blocks. My hard drive has more than enough space so don't think this is the issue. I've tried to run it all on it's own so don't think it is a computer resource issue.

[chrismanahan]

i'm seeing the same issue. i left my computer on for about 18 hours and still under 2.5 million blocks. i'm just recently learning about how all this works, so please don't mind my question if there's an obvious answer, but is there a reason wallet nodes on the network need the entire chain, instead of say, the most recent million? and then miner nodes could include the full chain for integrity

[MrFix3]

Seeing a similar issue, blockchain takes a long time, gets nearly to 100%, then starts the sync over again. I tried deleting the l%APPDATA\Roaming\Ethereum\geth\chaindata directory and restarting. That made the sync download run faster, I assume because it was doing a --fast sync, but it still fails to complete. I am using a Windows 10 PC, running 0.8.8 so I will update the build and try again just in case that's contributing.

[statsdroneadmin]

In 2 days I've moved 900,000 blocks. This wallet is useless, anybody else recommend any local wallets?

[statsdroneadmin]

400,000 blocks to go.

[isitabubble]

I've been trying to sync for more than 3 days now, have downloaded close to 50GB of chaindata and I've another 1.5Million blocks left to sync.

I am also new to this whole lot and don't want to end up loosing cash! In my hyped-up hurry to buy ETH I rushed into installing Ethereum Wallet app, copied the first legit looking address and used Changelly to change BTC to ETH and sent it to that address (my main account in the Ethereum wallet).

5 Days later still no sign of the ETH in my wallet. I'm hoping it is due to the ever-lasting sync ..? I feel like my coins are being held at ransom. What if it NEVER finishes syncing. :(

[SirHardo]

it seems that these tech-smart people have not made etherium participation user friendly AT ALL! Bitcoin is so uncomplicated! My Ether also 'lost' in thin air due to needing to 'sync'. Sync what for goodness sake?! I'm not a miner. 100gb sync data down already, in a perpetual sync. SO FRUSTRATING. I can see my ether on https://etherchain.org but i cant do a thing with it at all. Cant get it into ANY wallet whatsoever.

[OwlGreenApple]

I complete my sync (first instalation) with a week more 1 day. This is really annoying. :(

[vryfokkenou]

Yep. Same issue here. I've had my computer running non-stop, doing nothing but syncing the ethereum wallet and I'm still more than 1,5 million blocks away from done. And in the last two days or so progress has really come a near standstill. In the last 10 hours the wallet synced only about 15,000 blocks. At this pace it will literally never fully sync...

[statsdroneadmin]

Anybody have other eth wallets to suggest?

[vryfokkenou]

I've downloaded JAXX. It's a lightweight multi-coin wallet, but I'm using it to receive and store Ether. For now. Until I find a way of syncing the full node Ethereum Wallet.

[chrismanahan]

@alwayslookright I just started using Exodus. Before that, I was keeping it all in coinbase, which i don't advise because of the frequency of their outages lately. It's also more secure since you hold your private keys instead of a third party

[statsdroneadmin]

Anybody have any suggestions to help this process to finish syncing? I've been going for well over a week and it seems as it gets closer to synching, it gets slower and slower with no end in sight.

[ddon]

After several weeks, I have this: Downloading block 2,433,819 of 3,923,919 Downloaded so far 48.8 GB...

[garretlaxton]

You guys can use myetherwallet.com to access your ETH while your wallet syncs.

[ddon]

After 24 hours: Downloading block 2,438,870 of 3,923,919 Downloaded so far 50.6 GB

So, in 24 hours 5,051 blocks were downloaded, and since 1,485,049 left, it will take me 294 days :) nice... plus, by that time couple of millions extra blocks will be mined :)

[ddon]

Are these recommendations good ones? https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/603/help-with-very-slow-mist-sync

They say to start from very beginning and start geth with --fast --cache=1024 params and process will go much faster. Anybody knows about this?

[statsdroneadmin]

How are you supposed to access your wallet that was created on the ethereum.org site to open it in myetherwallet.com?

[garretlaxton]

@alwayslookright By using your backup file that you should have stored somewhere safe.

[dogonbeach]

Okay so is there a technical solution to this? A missing dependency or networking issue?

[ddon]

Just to update everyone here, --fast --cache=1024 params really helped the situation 👍

[stefkes]

Same problem here, this is basically unusable.

[ddon]

@stefkes start from scratch and do it without a GUI... start geth with --fast and --cache=1024 params, and it will be finished in no time.

Or use MyEtherWallet :-)

[tomtom87]

I started syncing my wallet on monday, still not synced on thursday. fucking rediculous..

[ghost]

top man for sharing @ddon .....

@tomtom87 . Just use geth on command line as per above and it works fine.

1) rm -rf ~/Libary/Ethereum/geth/chaindata ( or whereever chaindata has been stored on your machine. ) to clear out the old sync data. Otherwise it stays in slow mode.

2) geth --fast --cache=1024

You'll see it sync pretty quick.

[tomtom87]

Ive been running geth --fast will try the cache option, much appreciated for the support guys

Sent from my iPhone

On 19 Aug 2017, at 04:33, "blace.io" notifications@github.com wrote:

top man for sharing @ddon .....

@tomtom87 . Just use geth on command line as per above and it works fine.

rm -rf ~/Libary/Ethereum/geth/chaindata ( or whereever chaindata has been stored on your machine. ) to clear out the old sync data. Otherwise it stays in slow mode.

geth --fast --cache=1024

You'll see it sync pretty quick.

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[briandgoldberg]

You can use myethwallet.com to access your Etherium wallet that isn't syncing.

[delton137]

I deleted my chaindata and am trying to get my wallet to fast sync. I am using a linux soft link to save my chaindata on a different hard drive. I am usingethereum wallet --fast --cache=1024 to run the wallet. Is that effective, or do I have to run geth first with the command?

I am having an issue where my node is perpetually 50-100 blocks or so behind. I am not seeing any peers listed in the wallet GUI. Any ideas how to fix this?

It also seems that if I leave the wallet in the loading screen (ie do not click 'launch application' to run the GUI) it syncs faster. Has anyone else noticed this?

[tomtom87]

The lag of the network to i/o the disk is meaning you can never catch up with the chain. Its really moving that fast now.

So you need ssd, direct as same disk ur os is running. And patience. Took me 3 days non-stop. Just make sure your ssd, 100% computer on this one task, and turn it on n off again every time it glitches. Its really well made, can almost smell the vodka when u run geth.

On 30 Aug 2017, at 00:06, "Daniel C. Elton" notifications@github.com wrote:

I deleted my chaindata and am trying to get my wallet to fast sync. I am using a linux soft link to save my chaindata on a different hard drive. I am usingethereum wallet --fast --cache=1024 to run the wallet. Is that effective, or do I have to run geth first with the command?

I am having an issue where my node is perpetually 50-100 blocks or so behind. I am not seeing any peers listed in the wallet GUI. Any ideas how to fix this?

It also seems that if I leave the wallet in the loading screen (ie do not click 'launch application' to run the GUI) it syncs faster. Has anyone else noticed this?

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[delton137]

@tomtom87 thanks for your input. Unfortunately I cannot run on my SSD because it is only 256 Gbs. I am saving the chaindata to an old fashioned SATA platter drive. After 5 days of waiting, and restarting the wallet app many times, it finally synced up!! For a long time, I only had 1 or no peers, but now I have 12.

It seems the slower HDD was a factor, indeed, much to my surprise.

[pjotrt]

Hi, so i'm on a macbook and i cannot seem to find the folder where the chaindata is stored.. I can see however that it takes a shitload of gbs of my ssd drive which i need back.. Can anyone help me with this? and can i acces my wallet online instead of using this desktop app?

[delton137]

@alwayslookright I followed the instructions here: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/3307/in-mist-browser-how-can-i-move-the-data-blockchain-to-another-drive-on-mac-osx

Creating a soft link worked for me, although I had trouble copying all the files so I decided to delete the chain data and start resyncing from scratch. Make sure to backup your wallet file before mucking around in the .ethereum folder.

The directions there should work in MacOS. Assuming you are using the mist wallet, the chaindata should be saved in ~/.ethereum/geth/chaindata. To see how much space it takes up, load a terminal, type cd ./ethereum/geth/ to move to the directory and then type du -h --max-depth=1 to see how much space the chaindata directory uses.

[stobiewan]

Big issue is mechanical hard drives, minimum requirement to ever catch up is an SSD.

[tomtom87]

yes it must be SSD to sync, this should be made clear on installation really.

On 05/09/2017 17:22, stobiema wrote:

Big issue is mechanical hard drives, minimum requirement to ever catch up is an SSD.

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[delton137]

Yeah, without an SSD it keeps falling behind and the disk is constantly in use.

[babarriaz]

Hi, I am downloading Mist. It has been downloaded but another windows show that there are 4.2 million blocks yet to be downloaded. It says 0 of 4.2 million blocks. Does anyone know what is happening?

[detailyang]

Now HDD is the bottleneck to sync for me in aws node .

[squivo]

Hey Everybody. You need to be running an SSD. Now that I've said that though, you can try to force it to work on a platter. First you have to download geth - https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/ Then you have to run it command line BEFORE starting mist/ethwallet.
Most of you aren't starting from scratch, so --fast won't work. It only works if you start without a blockchain. command line : geth --cache=2048 --maxpeers=50 will get things moving

It still takes days to sync without an SSD, but it does work.

[Bennnow]

squivo thanks man! Can you break this down for me. I have a mac and don't how to do that. Don't know what --fast is or how to make use of it or what geth --cache=2048 is?

How can I do what you suggest exactly. Sorry if this is a dumb question!

[Bennnow]

Also is migrating from GETH to PARITY (as I have read elsewhere a good option?)

[squivo]

Follow these instructions: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Installation-Instructions-for-Mac. After installing brew, when you install geth with brew, it will a) put in an accessible location for you, and b) insert the binaries into your $PATH ( which means you can run geth from the Terminal from any folder location. Before starting Mist, open up the terminal, and run the geth --help command. You'll see all the options available. The default cache size is rather small so by setting --cache you're overriding the default ( same with --maxpeers ). Once you've got geth running in the terminal, THEN open up Mist, and wait forever. I would open up Activity Monitor as well, to see how close you are to maxing out your ram ( or, perhaps you can increase it ... --cache=4096 or more??? ). Let Mist sync. Don't Launch the App manually, wait until it catches up ( took me 2 weeks on my platter ). Once it's sync'd up, if you can leave your computer on most of the time, I would close Mist, stop geth, and restart it using a more reasonable cache size ( 1024 ) and restart Mist again. This way you free up ram so you can make crypto memes in photoshop.

[squivo]

I haven't experimented with PARITY yet

[Balloota]

I had less than hundred blocks to go and it hung... it was at some some 4e6 blocks with some 8e6 in the chain structure... when restarted, the remaining blocks are a still less than a hundred, the chain structure repeated from zero! Also strange is that the chain structure total is also increasing, giving no idea on how long this can still take...

[evertonfraga]

Hi, we have just launched Mist v0.9.1, with Light Client integration (beta).

What does that mean?

• Sync times reduced by an order of magnitude while staying safe.
• Much smaller storage required.

How to activate?

I'm closing this issue. Should you have any trouble, please refer to this canonical issue: https://github.com/ethereum/mist/issues/3097

[bit-warrior]

plz try this blockaction.io. We are running this on kovan testnet rightnow.

[tomtom87]

Great... so how can testnet help someone who wants mainnet ethers back? About as much use as a glass hammer bro

On 7 Oct 2017, at 06:25, bit-warrior notifications@github.com wrote:

plz try this blockaction.io. We are running this on kovan testnet rightnow.

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[tomtom87]

create token you can just deploy contract with web3 api or use MEW. You need a ssd to sync and use --fast --cache=1024 options

it will take around 2-6 hours on a mac book pro. i am syncing several for my team.

You cannot sync on mechanical hard disk only ssd.

On 15 Nov 2017, at 03:46, nhatphai99 notifications@github.com wrote:

guys, so how can you create the ERC20 token and contract ??? wait so long to sync that sh**

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[bit-warrior]

Same here, I have been syncing from last two week with no luck. Looks like ssd is must

[tomtom87]

you cannot sync without ssd it should be made clear at installation stage.

Also its best you run the docker image alongside mist i found this to be far more reliable.

If you cannot get sync keep turning it off n on again and praying to Vitalik a bit. Crossing fingers for luck can help, also sometimes wearing lucky underwear seems to have a positive effect on catching the elusive sync.

On 15 Nov 2017, at 07:52, bit-warrior notifications@github.com wrote:

Same here, I have been syncing from last two week with no luck. Looks like ssd is must

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