Importaddress taking a long time to run / does not work When I try to run importaddress using the core client it takes a long time to execute, over 10 minutes, even though I have supplied a "false" argument for rescanning. For example:

bitcoin-cli importaddress "32jdC23ABv86M2ptiqMzFzCaufBtE2NCdN" false


When I run this, it takes so long to compute that it times out with "unable to connect to server error". If it is not rescanning, what is it doing? Why is it taking so long just to add an address to the wallet?

(note that adding a label field makes no difference, it still hangs)
Use Bitcoin Core 0.14 (or higher) and the new importmulti RPC call.

importaddress does always a complete rescan (back to the genesis block) which can take serval hours. Very inefficient if you import multiple addresses.

where importmulti can import multiple keys/addresses at once only requiring a single rescan.
You can also set the according address birthday timestamp to avoid rescanning the complete chain from the genesis block.