Bitcoin-core syncing gets slower and slower

Services Support
21

Just wanted to share an update — I followed the guide from Start9: Start9 | Blockchain Migration, but instead of copying only the chainstate and blocks folders, I also included the indexes folder.

I copied everything from a fully synced Bitcoin Knots node running on macOS, and it worked perfectly.

The entire process, including the data transfer and setup, took less than a day. After restarting Bitcoin Knots service with the copied data, it resumed syncing immediately and at full speed — no more delays or sluggish block validation.

This method saved me a ton of time and frustration. Highly recommend it if you’re stuck with slow sync speeds.

2 Likes
22

It seems like the guide is written to transfer from Start9 to Start9. How were you able to do it from your Mac to start9? I want to do the same but just not 100% what needs to be done differently for Mac to start9

23

Once you’ve set up your SSH key so you can access your Start9 server, you need to run the following command in your terminal from the folder where your node’s data is stored on your Mac:

rsync -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/{your-ssh-key}" -povgr --progress --append --rsync-path="sudo rsync" ./{blocks,chainstate,indexes} start9@{your-server}.local:/embassy-data/package-data/volumes/bitcoind/data/main

It’s important that your Start9 node is completely clean before running this. Make sure there is nothing inside the folders you’re going to sync to.

After the transfer completes, I had to update the permissions only on the folders that were copied so they have the correct ownership on the Start9 server. You can do that with:

sudo -i
sudo chown -R root:root /embassy-data/package-data/volumes/bitcoind/data/main/blocks
sudo chown -R root:root /embassy-data/package-data/volumes/bitcoind/data/main/chainstate
sudo chown -R root:root /embassy-data/package-data/volumes/bitcoind/data/main/indexes
24

Thank you for the quick response. If my IBD doesn’t make any progress in the next week I’ll give this a try. Does it need to be a fresh Start9 node or do you think uninstalling then reinstalling Knots would be sufficient?

25

Reinstalling Knots is enough.