imo nu should really be using parallel signature checking
syncing could go 8 times faster, with 1 minute blockspacing, verifying can take a while (singlethreaded)
Pieter Wuille implemented many optimizations to the way transactions are verified, so a running, synchronized node uses less working memory and does much less I/O. He also implemented parallel signature checking, so if you have a multi-CPU machine all CPUs will be used to verify transactions.
https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.8.0
That would be awesome. Peercoin v0.5.0 should include the functions added in Bitcoin v0.8.0 (I didn’t dig in to see if there have been additional changes to the multithreading changes in future versions of Bitcoin) so once that’s been released we should be able to absorb it into Nu.
Alternatively, if someone is motivated to work on it, I’m sure that @sigmike, @erasmospunk, and @JordanLee would review a pull request to the Nu repository with only the multithreading changes from Bitcoin v0.8.0 merged in. I don’t know what type of customization this would require to make it work for Nu, so it may be easier said than done.