[Bitcoin-development] Scalability issues

[Aidan Thornton]

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 11:37 PM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Given a testbed: Pentium 4 1.8GHz single core, 2GB ram, FreeBSD 8,
> disk is geli aes-128 + zfs sha-256, bitcoin 0.6.3, Tor proxy,
> An estimate is made that by the end of the year bitcoin will
> completely overrun the capabilities of this reasonable class of
> machines.

That's actually slower-than-Atom class hardware you're running on
there, with full disk encryption on what's a very CPU and IO-heavy
workload. From the benchmarks I remember, your CPU is literally slower
than the first generation of single-core netbooks - the ones reviewers
recommended against using full disk encryption on because they just
didn't have enough CPU power to manage it. It's not surprising that
Bitcoin isn't usable on that setup.