I am new to Tezos and I installed yesterday a node to run in the Alphanet environment. I want to ask if it is normal that the node is taking too long to synchronize (Current head at block 45000 after almost one day). Is there any way to accelerate the process? Another issue is that the node stops sometimes unexpectedly. This is an example of the error resulting in the issue.
Does anyone understand the problem? And is there any way to avoid that?
To accelerate the process you need a fast internet and a good ssd since synchronization is heavy on I/O.
You should also add the main peers to your node, @utdrmac shared a shell script for that: https://gist.github.com/utdrmac/2125a8514960e163837e86bc934f19b6, change to alphanet peers and that script will connect to them.
If you tried all of that and still no luck, try making a vpc on aws or digitalocean and synchronize the node there with what I explained above.
For mainnet you can use QuickSync to accelerate the synchronization, they update it weekly.
About the error, make sure everything is updated.
