Oct 22, 2024

Well I tracked this down. In our configuration we have settings for min and max services.

services_minimum = 9                # witness node
services_maximum = 9                # witness node

This is how I've had my config file set up for a long time. However running with default config, the min is set to 1. Because this results in the node not requiring witness capable peers, this implies the node is not a witness node, and everything operates pre-witness serialization. This drops a large amount of data from the input table, where the witness is stored. I first noticed it there, and then figured out that node default value was 1, so when running without config we shaved off 15 minutes. So the reported 45 minutes is legit, but it's for non-witness (legacy node). The witness-included sync remains at about 60 minutes.