So I just set up a node and saw outbound connections cap at 10 while inbound is higher. Feels like having more outbound would speed up syncing, right? Why not increase it beyond 10 if my internet's solid?
Not so fast. The 10 (plus one) is usually enough if you've got a couple of solid peers. Sync speed isn’t just about download; you gotta think about verification and disk I/O too. Sometimes hardware can't keep up, so it's not always a speed issue.
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Exactly! The design keeps it that way on purpose. There are fewer nodes that accept incoming connections. If we increase outbound too much, it could overload the reachable ones. It’s a balancing act.
There are ways to speed up the initial block download, but it won’t always be smooth. SSDs help a ton for the chainstate, but if you're using traditional hard drives, it could get laggy unless you have enough RAM to keep things running smoothly.
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Peak chainstate size has been around 12.8GB, but whether it's that or 11GB, the previous suggestions are still valid. Storage matters a whole lot.
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Honestly, I doubt adding more outbound peers will drastically speed things up. Bitcoin Core and Knots already pull blocks from the fastest peers in parallel. After hitting around 10 outbound, the benefits drop off while overhead goes up.
Good point, I didn’t consider how chainstate size could vary over time. My nodes also don’t limit outgoing connections, and I haven’t noticed crazy IBD pulls. Running through Tor might be its own kind of bottleneck, but traffic's been chill.