3 days 6.6 hours
I don't expect much improvement in the sync times prior to the release, but these numbers are looking pretty good, especially since the blockchain grows by about 1 million blocks per month and these numbers are still close to times from the release last year despite all the blocks that have been added since then.
Oh, not only that, they are better than times that we had 4 years ago when we had less than half of the blocks that we have now.
It's funny to look at old posts to compare what have changed:
Here's my 4 years old "Hive Pressure 2: How to Answer Hive Questions?"
TL;DR: "Roughly you need 4 days and 9 hours to have it synced to the latest head block."
Of course my old server, and not even my current one can't beat yours, but assuming 33% slower, I think it could still keep up with with 4d9h benchmark :-)
Well, it is of course a night and day comparison if we look at code from 4 years ago.
For some reason (I can't remember why), I took a look at state of Steemit code a couple of days ago to see how long it looks like it will be before it collapses under its own weight.
It turns out the only "fixes" that have been done are all to limit the functionality of the code so that their servers don't just die now.
As one example, despite having about 1/10th our transaction volume, apparently their servers began having problems serving up account histories and this was loading down the API servers and resulting in locking issues in the hived nodes that were serving up account history info.
What was the solution? Speed it up or offload the work? Nope! Instead now they only allow fetching the last 7 days worth of operations for an account :-) I guess you're supposed to go to a block explorer to see the rest...
That's a hilariously bad solution, but absolutely 100% on-par for what Sun would mandate, so I'm not at all surprised.
Giving Sun even credit for this is in fact too much credit: as far as I can tell, it was done by some independent dev, who can see the upcoming wall that Steem is driving towards and is trying to slow down the car.