As I download the block chain I noticed it slowed down as I got to 75% is that normal because maybe more usage of newer blocks? Was wondering also is there any reason to put my Sparrow Wallet on the server or just on my desktop ok and if so do I need Electrs install still?
Wayne
Initially, yes it starts to gradually slow down as, historically, Bitcoin’s usage began to take off. The main slowdown, however, starts when you hit the point in the chain where the UTXO set began to explode as the Ordinals/Inscription/BRC-20 spam kicked off.
The main physical bottleneck is not from the increased network bandwidth due to the blocks becoming larger (though that does factor in to a small extent). The primary bottleneck is file I/O. This is because the entire UTXO set must be held in memory as blocks are validated. As the UTXO set grows beyond your system’s RAM capacity, it begins to use the disk as virtual memory, swapping to and from the disk.
With a gen4 NVMe SSD this can still happen fairly quickly, and the IBD will usually finish in around 24 hours. Gen3 is a tad slower, a SATA SDD even slower, and an external SSD over USB 3.x even slower. USB2.x will never complete the IBD (thus why most Raspberry Pi models can no longer be used to run a full node).
On the question of Sparrow, personally I prefer to use it installed on my main PC rather than using the Sparrow “service” that is in the Start9 community registry. This is because that service is fully sandboxed, with no access to USB devices, cameras, bluetooth, NFC, nothing. The only way to get transactions in and out (to work with on your hardware signer) is via a clunky WebTop clipboard interface which acts as a gatekeeper between the client’s clipboard and the service’s internal clipboard.
You can more-or-less make this work with a Coldcard or other air-gapped hardware signer which supports file-based air-gapped integration. It will not work with any hardware signer which relies on a USB cable, camera, blootooth, or NFC interface. The trade-off, of course, is that it introduces quite a bit more security into your workflow. It is a bit overkill though, IMO.
So bought a new MB/AMD550 6core and 8gb ddr4 and yes I had a 2tb sata ssd drive I put inside. So after the slow blockchain download I hope it will run ok. It sucks I have like a 100 GB download it got to 75% area after day and a half, now it’s slowed down a lot.
Wayne
It’ll take a few days to finish, but once it finishes the IBD it should work well from that point. As new blocks are mined, it will take a bit longer than normal to verify them, so if you are watching your service status page, every 10 minutes or so you’ll see a message for a short while mentioning that the sync timed out and will retry shortly. You can ignore that message if you see it. I have a test server which is very close to what you are running there in terms of the specs, and it has been working fine for the last year since it finished the IBD. If you ever decide in the future to upgrade the system a bit, adding at least another 8 GB of RAM will resolve that issue.