Skip to main content

More Memory Fixes and a Snapshot Update

· 2 min read

The team has a new release tagged 2021.04.12.0 which contains a some fixes that should allow older Hotspots to keep consuming the chain, as well as a snapshot bump.

blockchain#773 Fix Snapshot Generation on Older Hardware

Normally we don't spend a lot of time discussing the minor details of these releases, but one of the reasons that we've done a lot of them in the past two weeks is that older units are having more and more issues validating the chain as more Hotspots join the network. Mostly this takes the form of the older hardware running out of memory on startup, which loops forever. We take this sort of thing quite seriously, and it motivates a lot of recent work on our coming shift to Validator servers instead of running the Consensus Group on individual Hotspots. Several fixes in the past two weeks have contained fixes for these low memory units and all have helped, but have not completely eliminated the problem.

This particular fix limits the number of attempts to generate a snapshot which, in our testing, shows is a major point of failure on units with less RAM.

Bump Snapshot

We have also updated the snapshot block to 800641 to allow newly onboarded hotspots to sync faster to the current blockchain head block.

Plan

We have been beta testing 2021.04.12.0 since April 12th, 2021 1:15 PM PT. Current ETA for GA is 3:00 PM PT, April 12th, 2021.