Running cli wallets against a remote node

So it should seem pretty obvious that running a wallet cli instance against a remote node will be slower than running it against a local one (same machine even). But what’s the difference?

So i’ve set about finding out by creating 2 wallets, one on Loki blockchain and the other on Graft and then timing the rescan_bc command against each. This rescans the whole blockchain for transactions. So I set up a script to spit out the time, do the scan, then spit out the time. For the first run’s I ran these again hashvaults public nodes, and for the second runs again local nodes I created myself running each with 2*5650 Xeons, 16GB RAM, 80GB SATA I drives. Nothing special going on optimisation wise, programs compiled directly from their githubs without modification.

Loki: 33s remote – 12s local
Graft: 74s remote – 10s local

So clearly local wins – but it’s still slow.

The size of the blockchains are:

Loki 11G, Graft, 19G.
BTC 230G, LTC 21G, XMR 64G, ETN 37G.

I should probably create backup or snapshots so I don’t have to resync ever again as it takes an age.