I've tried resetting the sync and it still comes to a screeching halt around block number 2.4m. I know about the attacks on Ethereum around those blocks, but this is ridiculous:
I've been syncing for 4 days now, the first day I went from #0 to about #2.2m second day I got to ~#2.4m and the last 2 days it hasn't even got half way to #2.5m. Isn't Parity supposed to be significantly faster than this? I tried syncing with Geth first and it got permanently stuck at 141 blocks left in the same time it's taken parity to slow down to a highway parking lot. Now I can't even get Geth to get back to where it was, since I reset it anyway. Is there any other options to get this thing synced faster? Like downloading someone else's block chain copy or something?
This is how I run Parity: parity --min-peers=50 --max-peers=100 --cache 4096 --geth
Update:
By the end of the 6th day, it sped back up because it past the troubled range. Now it's stalled again with less than 200k blocks left. Yay me. Any ideas?
Best Answer
I'm being totally serious when I say that the best thing to do is simply be patient. As long as you're getting new blocks, there's not much to do. If on the other hand, Parity continues to report the same block, then you can kill it and restart it.
Blocks between around ~2286900 and ~271800 are very, very slow because of the DDOS attack in Sept/Oct 2016. What happens is the blocks are very long playing, so if you repeatedly kill the node while it's processing a block and restart it, you're making it take that much longer because it has to start over on that block. Once it gets past ~271800 it should speed up again.