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Consensus Team Update

· 2 min read
Damian Nadales

High level summary​

This week the Consensus team worked on integrating the latest node release into the UTxO HD branch. Our ad-hoc benchmarks in which we sync a node from scratch showed that the LMDB backend uses around 8GB of memory. We also released new versions of fs-sim and fs-api, and released strict-checked-vars.

UTxO-HD​

  • Rebased UTxO-HD on top of node 8.2 (issue)
  • Address new Maybe translations for UTxOs in Conway 1.6. (PR).
  • Performed ad-hoc benchmarking syncs with both implementations. The LMDB backend uses around 8GB of memory.
  • Fixed an infinite loop on the mempool tracing code that was preventing the node from shutting down gracefully.
  • Fixed an infinite loop on the ledger state query for traversing queries that prevented the node from running QueryUTxOByAddress (PR).
  • Measured the speed of QueryUTxOByAddress under different queryBatchSize values. There is a significant performance degradation for these queries when using the UTxO-HD version. Using the mainnet UTxO set at slot 90 million, querying an address took 40 seconds using the in-memory backend and 90 seconds using the LMDB backend, whereas the baseline took 7 seconds. We need to investigate if we can improve this situation or whether an external service that runs alongside the node is a better solution.
  • Refactored and implemented ledgertable-related classes for the general HardforkBlock.

Genesis​

  • Frisby and Esgen continue to engage with the Researchers on grinding against the Genesis design.

Fostering collaboration​

  • Drafted a document explaining versioning of local state queries #273.

Support​

  • Frisby is the release engineer this cycle.
  • Successfully created work-in-progress ouroboros-consensus and cardano-api commits that integrate the 2023 Aug 7 tip of cardano-ledger. This will require a release of ouroboros-consensus, which hasn't happened yet.