Trying to sync Namecoin for 3 days now. Here are some stats

[krisives]

Hi guys! Great work on Namecoin so far. Please don't take anything I say as mean, I just want to make Namecoin better.

I've ran Bitcoin a lot and been involved in some other alt-coins, so I'm pretty used to downloading a blockchain and how many resources that uses versus how long it takes. Namecoin however seems to be at an odd cross section of having grown in some ways to have a larger blockchain, but doesn't have the "manpower" or bandwidth behind it to scale like Bitcoin does. (Not saying there is a flawed design, it's just the current adoption)

With that said about a week ago I started downloading the blockchain and syncing a brand new Namecoin client version 0.3.80 from the homepage. After leaving it on for quite a while and not noticing much improvement I remembered that this is a fork from a very old copy of Bitcoin code (I think?) and it probably still has very poor IO performance for parsing the blockchain, and my SSD had just recently died and I was running on RPM disks. But hey, I have a shit ton of memory, so I fired up a large RAM disk.

Now Namecoin is running on a RAM disk entirely for the last 3 days and has still made very poor progress to syncing. My network health is good, I'm seeing lots of peers (always says I have 15 peers connected and the bar raph is "lit up" to green) I checked the IO to the RAM disk it's fine and can go multiple gigabytes write and read.

Now I turned open the Resource Monitor in Windows and pretty clear it becomes clear that over time Namecoin stops downloading the blockchain. I have to restart the client to get it to continue to download the blockchain. When I start I can see it begin to download at a modest 150K/s but it gets slower and slower until eventually namecoin-qt.exe doesn't even show up in the list and when it comes back it's sending about 38 bytes per second then goes away again (probably a keepalive to connected peers)

I'm running on a quad core 3.6 Ghz with 32 GB of RAM and a connection fast enough to download 30GB in minutes and it feels a bit wrong to be waiting days on a 1.5GB blockchain that I can't seem to find a bootstrap for.

For anyone curious I am using AMD's software for a 4GB RAM disk. I have namecoin installed to a drive called "Z:" and a separate data directory inside that, so I launch the application with:

namecoin-qt -datadir=data

Any ideas on how I can get this to sync faster would be much appreciated. Hope any of this can help.

[cassini]

namecoin-qt -datadir=data

First of all try two additional parameters:

Code: Select all

namecoin-qt -datadir=data -printtoconsole -dbcache=500

I suspect the ramdisk software has a problem either with heavily defragmented files ( -printtoconsole prevents the frequent appending of small bits of debug messages to the debug.log file) or with direct database access (the -dbcache value may solve (ram)disk access issues).
Furthermore, make sure your PC doesn't go in hibernate/sleep/suspend mode during downloading the blockchain.

[krisives]

Just reporting back to help anyone who found this. Not sure why Namecoin was syncing so slow for so long. I tested my network to ensure it was working correctly each time I had a problem and I had good network access.

My guess is that UPnP or something along the lines got crossed up or maybe the NAT fairy came and payed a visit. In any event, frustrated days later I simply restarted Namecoin and it began syncing at 1MB/s and finished downloading the blockchain.

Like I said I think it was UPnP or NAT failing somewhere, but it's possible that more people are using Namecoin recently since I know there has been a bit of a push to get more users running nodes (at least I have seen some discussion on /r/bitcoin about it)