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
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.
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
