Wait, the syncing should not take more than ~800MB RAM at any point of
its execution??

There needs to be a formal figure for how much RAM is needed, RAM is
always a cost and users cannot just be presumed to have so-and-so-many
GB available. Even OS "ulimit":s can be of ~1-4GB only leading to
application crash if you hit the ceiling, so this must be clarified?

On 2015-05-17 10:45, Neill Miller wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've recently started looking into this and found some interesting
> results.
>
> 1) It's slow for various reasons, but I think it's largely attributed
> to transaction processing and larger RAM demands. In the ~337000+
> block range, bs quite quickly consumes a majority of RAM on my 16GB
> machine causing swap to be hit and things sort of degrade from there.
> I suspect the many calls to sync are fairly brutal as well in that
> case, but I have not looked into that performance yet. My network
> inspection also showed a healthy amount of data incoming when
> requested, so nothing odd there.