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I've had Bitcoin-QT running for about six total hours, and the rate at which it's catching up is glacial at best. It takes about an hour to advance a week, which would make the process take about 4 days to complete. It didn't take nearly this long on my PC; I started and finished the process while my Mac was still running. I'm running Bitcoin-Qt v.0.10.1 64-bit on a 2011 MBP, 8 GB of RAM, on 10.10.4. Is this normal, or is there something wrong?
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Sadly Bitcoin-Qt's (and bitcoind's) default DB cache size is very small for systems like yours.
You should definitively add -dbcache=4000 (use 4GB of RAM for UTXO-set-database [etc.] cache).
This should speedup your sync significant.
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By the sounds of things and your fix, I would say that you had a blockchain created by an earlier version of Bitcoin-QT and something in the migration process in making that work with newer versions is causing it to take longer than to download the whole blockchain fresh with the latest versions. It's always advisable to keep a backup of wallet.dat (so you don't lose access to your wallet) but you can dump the rest of the application support directory which is mostly blockchain.
It's perfectly normal. It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that you're running it on a Mac. If you're feeling lucky, you can stop it and restart it (it will continue where it left off) and hope that it will randomly choose faster peers. – Greg Hewgill – 2015-05-21T22:48:14.177
1I actually solved this problem just a second ago, by manually deleting the block chain and starting over. It's going much faster now. – Jack – 2015-05-21T23:11:55.947