I have tried to download blockchain locally on my node and it somehow takes a lot longer time and slow. Perhaps this can also be addressed in future updates. Fortunately, there is a way to bootstrap process by downloading from http://steemitup.eu.
Here are recent Steem improvements, which will be enabled after hardfork 26th July
Version 0.12.2
This is a soft-fork and an update to Hard Fork 12 to address oversized blocks and transactions.
All witnesses should update as soon as possible.
Version 0.12.1
This release contains performance improvements for running a local node and is optional. v0.12.0 and v0.12.1 are compatible with each other.
Release notes can be found here