After running Knots for 10 hours overnight, the IBD progress is still at 0.88%. The service logs show that it is definitely syncing. In my VM setting, network adaptor is attached to Bridged Adapter. According to the internet speed test my internet connection has not slowed down at all since the IBD began. Obviously, it is using Tor. In the Knots setting, “Disable Clearnet” is unchecked. ChatGPT gave me two things to try: 1. Manually add “Clearnet” peers such as 192.162.215.1 (Luke Dashjr’s node) or 104.198.11.134 (Generic high-speed node). 2. In the VM network setting’s Promiscuous Mode, select “Allow VMs” or “Allow All.” It’s currently “Deny.” Which should I try?
ChatGPT gave me some fixes to try but I want to get some feedback first. Here are what the Chat suggested. Please let me know what you think.
- Enable Host I/O Cache. (currently unchecked)
- Switch disk controller from SATA → NVMe inside VM settings.
- Switch the Virtual Disk from dynamic to fixed size.
- Switch the VM network setting’s Promiscuous Mode from “Deny” to “Allow VMs” or “Allow All.”
- It suggested adding peers manually but I think I already have 11 peers based on the “Connections 11 (1 in / 11 out)” under Bitcoin Knots/Properties.
Other information:
CPU cores assigned:2. RAM assigned:8192MB.
I added a NVME to a barebone NUC14MNK-B2. Has 4 CPU cores.
Below is my current Knots settings:
Knots/Config
ZeroMQ enabled
Transaction index enabled
Coinstats index disabled
Pruning mode disabled
Bitcoin Knots/Config/RPC settings
RPC server timeout 30
Threads 16
Work Queue 128
Bitcoin Knots/Config/Advanced/peers
“Make public” enabled
“Disable peer discovery” disabled
“Disable Clearnet” disabled
“Use V2 P2P transport protocol” enabled
Bitcoin Knots/Properties
Disk usage 5.99 G1B
Connections 11 (1 in / 11 out)
This usually takes a lot of time for new build…72+ hours is normal. Give it some time
The problem is the low amount of RAM. It will likely take a few days to complete. How much RAM is available on your host?
CORSAIR - VENGEANCE 16GB (1x16GB) DDR5 4800MHz C40 SODIMM Laptop Memory
You might see if it will let you bump the RAM up to 12GB (just don’t do anything else on the host while it is running – will likely have low memory issues). Any extra RAM you can sqeeze out will be helpful.
Fixed disk size would speed up the file IO (which is needed in low-RAM setups for memory swapping). Enable Host I/O Cache may help a little (but will probably be negligable, since the IBD is a fairly continuous load, not bursty – this would be more helpful after you complete the IBD)
Switching to NVMe in the settings may make some difference, since it would match the underlying tech (so theoretically, less translation would be required)
The network settings or adding peers are not going to help. The bottleneck is rarely the network. It is file I/O (due to memory swapping in low RAM setups).
I bumped it to 12GB. Hopefully that will fix it. It’s my understanding that the IBD uses the clearnet (not Tor). Should I expect to see my internet speed drop if the IBD is running normally through the clearnet?
No noticeable difference. Still it’s about 0.01% an hour.
The IBD can use both Tor and clearnet. Clearnet speeds are faster than Tor, but as long as you have a few peers, network speed is rarely the bottleneck.
There are also a number of optimizations that you can add if things don’t improve. Here are a few that you can check (Chat GPT can probably come up with even more ideas):
- Make sure Intel VT-x / Intel Virtualization Technology is enabled in your BIOS
- Disable Hyper-V and various related features (only if you don’t use WSL though)
– Hyper-V
– Virtual Machine Platform
– Windows Hypervisor Platform
– Windows Sandbox
– Windows Subsystem for Linux - Select the High (or Ultimate if available) performance setting
- If you have a performance profile option (probably not – I think this is just for OEM setups), make sure it is not set to anything like “Battery saver” or “Quiet”
You could also try temporarily turning off Memory Integrity (and maybe Core Isolation too), which impacts speeds a bit. Re-enable after the IBD is finished. I found a guide here that goes into enabling/disabling these.