Faster bootstrap on mainnet

'm setting up an Algorand node on Linux. On a fast connection, I’m only syncing about 1500 blocks per minute. That means it will take ~40 hours to initially sync the mainnet currently. Is this true and is there currently a faster way for me to get up and running with the Algorand mainnet?

Congratulation on your fresh installation !

As you’ve noticed, the first sync takes a long time. During that time, your node is downloading each of the blocks, and validate all the signatures along the way to ensure no funny business took place.
When it’s done, it will end up with a synchronized node that its state can be trusted.

At this time, we don’t have a faster method to perform the catchup operation.

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If you have ~60GB free, there’s a tool called catchupsrv in the repo.


First you run it in “download” mode and it downloads (but doesn’t check) all the blocks. Next you run it in “serve” mode and point algod at it, and algod will catch up from it and check all the blocks. The tool was intended to be used for bringing algod on an airgapped machine up-to-date, and in theory it should be no faster than letting algod catch up on its own, but in practice it seems to be somewhere between 4 and 10 times faster.
(As for why algod catchup is slower than catchupsrv, we suspect there’s an issue with algod going over a server-site rate limit and getting throttled, but we’re still investigating. There’s an open github issue for this at https://github.com/algorand/go-algorand/issues/592.)

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