Historical Bitcoin Core Client Performance

After reading about performance optimizations on the Bitcoin Core blog, I wanted to see a chart of that. I couldn’t find one, so I spun up a bunch of EC2 nodes and set out to measure how long it took each new version of the bitcoin core client to sync the full blockchain.

Initial Blockchain Download (IBD) on Amazon EC2 (~474K blocks, t2.xlarge, 4 cores, 16 GiB, GP2 200 GiB SSD). Light blue is blocks up 2014–01–01, dark blue up to early July 2017. For explanation of Assume Valid Block, see text below.

Read the full blog post here.