I decided to install Fulcrum because the latest version of Electrs seems to be causing Bitcoin Core to crash.
However, while Electrs took only a couple of days for initial indexing, Fulcrum is progressing extremely slowly. At the current rate, it looks like it could take over 30 days.
Is this normal? Has anyone experienced something similar?
Also, for those using Fulcrum, is there a specific advantage over Electrs? Is it actually worth installing, or would you recommend sticking with Electrs?
Fulcrum is the current recommended, and supported Indexer. The initial sync does take longer. But after that, you’ll find it performs significantly better, than Electrs. The initial sync is a very heave load, and the completion time will depend on hardware specs. You can minimize the initial sync time by stopping other services that are not immediately needed, to free up system resources. More RAM makes a significant difference. By default, during the initial sync Fulcrum consumes 1/4 of the system RAM. If you can free up resources on your server, you can bump that number to a larger amount manually, under Actions & config>Configure. The setting you’d be looking for is Database Memory. If you manually set this, you’ll need to remember to clear it once the initial sync is complete.
Quick update: Fulcrum is now at around 42% (block 408,000 out of 972,000) after 6 days of indexing. It’s currently processing around 6–10 blocks per minute, so at this rate, it could take another 4 weeks to finish.
I’ve also noticed frequent errors in the Fulcrum logs:
The remote host closed the connection
Lost connection to bitcoind, will retry every 5 seconds
Bitcoin Core is fully synced and running normally, although its logs occasionally show txindex is catching up on block notifications.
Could these RPC disconnections be contributing to the slow indexing? Is this speed expected during the initial sync, or could there be a configuration issue?