One of the answers to this question suggested using Geth's --fast
flag to help quickly synchronise the block data.
How does the flag work, and how does using it speed up the synchronisation? Are we syncing less data, or are we in some way performing fewer checks on its integrity or source?
Edit:
As of Geth version 1.6.0, the --fast
flag has become --syncmode=fast
(though --fast
is also still usable for now).
Best Answer
There's a lot of detail on this PR on github. Here's a quote: