Slow starting bitcoind bitcoind is extremely slow to start (~5-20 minutes). I'm not talking about keeping up with the blockchain, that would be perfectly fine, I'm talking about an initial phase where it doesn't even respond to requests: any call to it returns "error: couldn't connect to server" (either from command line or from web).

Is it a known issue, is there a workaround?

OSX 10.6.8, bitcoind 0.7.0 (but happened with earlier versions too).
You very probably have a massive wallet.dat file.

This happens with Instawallet's bitcoind, it takes an hour to start up, it spends this time loading the wallet.

If you want to make sure :


Stop bitcoind
Open up a Terminal, and type :
$ tail -f ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin/debug.log
Press ⌘K to clear the scrollback and window
Start bitcoind


You should see some output when the client starts, if the problem is actually with loading the wallet the output should stop for a while on 'Loading wallet'.