So our c5.xlarge instance in AWS is processing about 1k checkpoints per day on average. With somewhere around 275068 checkpoints, it would take around 275 days to complete the full sync. Now the rate of checkpoints processed per day is variable, so that estimation is off, but the process only seems to be slowing as more checkpoints are processed.

Has anyone else experienced this when running a full sync (including writing the archive)?

5 months later

It took about 3 days to catchup from scratch on a dedicated host with 4 core Xeon with 16GB memory back in mid August.

To speed up a bit: You can use the stellar-archivist to download the archive first. More details it the this stack exchange answer.

[deleted] sure! You can do that! Just make sure that you do not kill the DB otherwise you may end up with a corrupt DB.

    @[deleted] systemctl stop stellar-core would stop the stellar-core service but not the DB. To stop the DB gracefully you would need systemctl stop postgresql which won't kill the DB but would shut it down fine.

    Just for note: from the way how you stop the stellar-core it seems you are not using the docker images. With docker, you would also need to make sure that you are not using ephemeral storage for the DB and for the stellar-core config/archive.