We rolled out the Beta update over the weekend and it appears to have helped some, but a number of issues were discovered that caused unneeded network load, slowing down blocks and elections.
Content
An optimization was added to ignore transactions already in the honey badger buffer.
Elections that failed were not being cleaned up. Now they are.
A recent blockchain refactor was reverted because it was inappropriately dropping transactions.
The transaction manager now dumps a transaction if it sees f+1 rejections from the consensus group.
More informative logging messages added around transaction validation and speculative absorption. This will help diagnose lingering issues.
Deployment Plan
The patches are directly related to a focused set of issues that should improve chain behavior. We plan to let this beta run for 24 hours and then deploy it to the network at large.