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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

As a piece of anecdata: I run a Bitcoin node at home with no troubles, but I've been totally unable to sync the Ethereum chain. Trying to do so drags my computer to its knees for hours and doesn't seem to be making very much progress.

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How are you running geth? I run "geth --cache 2048 --syncmode fast" on Linux, and that updates the blockchain fairly quickly.

If you don't have the blockchain downloaded yet, I'd look for a zipped version online. You can import it locally using "geth copydb <location>".

Same issue using geth. Switched to parity and it worked.

I recommend using Ethereum Wallet / geth in light mode.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/669cn9/how_to_use...

There is an option for this in the GUI version as well.

    Developer > Sync with light client (beta)

I couldn't sync with the full node because it would take ages + ~100 GB. Light mode has worked like a charm.

How big is light mode?

I've heard reports being anywhere between 350 MB to a few gigs. Substantially smaller than the full chain, and faster.

As of today: 2.1GB

I gave up trying to run geth and switched to parity instead. It works, for now, but it takes longer and longer to catch up each time (I only run it occasionally for metamask).

Make sure and run latest parity, they just fixed a massive perf bug. https://github.com/paritytech/parity/releases/tag/v1.8.6

Not enough IOPS

That's basically it. My PC that keeps up (and can sync a month of updates in about an hour) will typically be thrashing an SSD at 55MB/s while using about 15Mbit/s internet.

On an older PC I can't sync, it keeps falling further and further behind. It's got a slow old spinning rust disk.

As a note, I believe the Geth devs have an update coming where they use more memory caching which saves smashing the disk so hard during sync.

The final frontier

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