Another big issue that we've been dealing with recently is sync times on new Hotspots. We've seen cases recently when new Hotspots have taken in excess of 10 days to fully sync and start issuing challenges. This release is the first to support a feature we're calling "ledger snapshots", which allow Hotspots to safely sync without downloading the entire blockchain first. A few times a day, the running consensus group will take a snapshot of its ledger, package it up with a relatively small number of blocks and then store its hash on the chain. We can then attest the validity of a particular snapshot to allow new Hotspots to download that snapshot and start using it, much as we now attest to the validity of a particular block (and all the blocks leading up to it). This should allow syncing in hours, rather than in days as is currently the case.
This feature requires a new chain variable to be enabled, so please, if you're running a blockchain core based service, go update it to the latest core now, so that it doesn't halt when we issue the chain variable transaction.
This release also contains enhancements for our recent state channels releases, and a number of support features for our API services.
Contents
Plan
A 2020.05.27.0 release was deployed to the beta group in the morning of Wednesday the 27th around
11:50AM PST. This follows a series of previous beta releases we used for testing, starting on Friday
22nd. We'll briefly beta, given the numerous previous releases, and then GA in the early afternoon.
Following this we'll release a chain variable transaction (setting snapshot_interval to 240) to
activate this code.