Daemon sync questions

Question

I've been letting the daemon sync for a while now, a few days actually, and it's at 80% and now going very slowly forward. About 20 blocks at a time. I understand why this happens, but this case seems out of the ordinary from what I've seen from other questions. My question is: can I expect this to slow down further due to block size? I'm a patient man, but I'd like to know what to expect.

Secondly, I read in another question (Will I need to update wallet and miner after the next upcoming (March 2019) fork?) that the upcoming fork will require a daemon update. Will this involve another full sync of the daemon? I don't want to let it finish only to have to wait on it for another week.

Thank you in advance! Apologies for the likely common questions or any mix-up in terms, I'm brand new to cryptocurrency and a lot of information is going right over my head.

Answer 1

Hi and welcome to Monero.

Syncing:

I am going to make a guess here and assume you are using a HDD. This will sync slower than an SSD so will take a while to sync. You may also be connected to some slow peers. Be patient or download the raw database and perform an import. This may actually be slower though, depending on your internet speed.

Upcoming network upgrade:

This will not require a full new blockchain sync. Once you've updated your software, when you run the latest version, it will upgrade the database to the latest version.