# Node syncronization time

**URL:** <https://forum.algorand.co/t/node-syncronization-time/1191>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [December 13, 2019, 12:21pm UTC](https://forum.algorand.co/t/node-syncronization-time/1191 "2019-12-13T12:21:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![rmb](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/forum.algorand.co/rmb/32/594_2.png) [@rmb](https://forum.algorand.co/u/rmb)\
**Post date:** [July 27, 2020, 11:45am UTC](https://forum.algorand.co/t/node-syncronization-time/1191/5 "2020-07-27T11:45:12Z")

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Hi @tsachi, I noticed the fast catchup in the GitHub repository and look forward to hearing more about it.

My node is currently catching up at an averaging of around 61K block per hour (~17 blocks per second) and is not limited by network bandwidth. The mainnet is currently a little over 8.1 million blocks which give my machine an estimated time to catch up of nearly 133 hours (5 and a half days).

Granted that my machine is a relatively low spec and 10 years old so according to Moore’s law I might expect a similar machine purchased today to be processing at a rate of around 29 times faster. (assuming 40% annual growth rate). It is currently consuming around 300 KiB/s so the increased processing rate would take it up to around 9 MiB/s (which is well within the upper limit of my network connection).

Assuming that it will not be bound by network bandwidth, then could I really expect my node to take just 4.6 hours to synchronise if I were to deploy onto a recently purchased mid-spec laptop?  
If so then why is this comment in the Docker Sandbox section “This method is recommended if you […] but can’t wait days for your node to catchup”

I am making a few assumptions here. E.g.

- The code is multi-threaded and the rate of block processing increases linearly dependent on the number of cores
- The requests for blocks from peers are appropriately pipelined so that the inter-block receive rate is not a bottleneck

What experience has anyone had synchronising a server-grade, high-bandwidth/cloud-hosted node?  
What is a realistic number of blocks per hour it can process while catching up?

My initial question in this thread was about how long it might take to synchronise a node in 1-year, 5-years, or even 10-year’s time.

GoalSeaker is currently showing the average blocktime to be around 4.4 seconds. At this rate, in a year’s time we can expect the mainnet to be around 7 million blocks longer than it is right now - meaning that my current node would take a further ~115 hours (~4.8 days) to synchronise from a standing start. (My mythical modern processing node would take a further 4 hours.)

This suggests that the processing effort required to synchronise a node is out-pacing Moore’s law (perhaps Moore’s law will not be true moving forwards).

Feel free to criticize my assumptions and I look forward to hearing people’s real-world experience of this.

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