Speeding up bitcoin-qt on Linux
The problem After freshly installing bitcoin-qt - the de-facto bitcoin client - to a computer, it starts downloading "blocks" from the network. The last few (tens of) thousands of blocks are especially slow, and the client is using the disk heavily. Examining the disk usage closely with iostat showed that the disk utilization was 100%, but at a very low data rate. My disk can read and write about 150 MBytes/second if utilized properly, but bitcoin-qt could only write about one megabytes per second. (EDIT: thanks for the donation, you rock! :) )