Comments on: Block Explorer Progress - What's Done, What's Next

By: whaack

whaack — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 16:48:35 +0000

@Diana Coman

The solipsistic "the world consists of what I can see" is evident on reread.

By: Diana Coman

Diana Coman — Sun, 19 Jul 2020 07:38:21 +0000

It seems like half of the network resides on asciilifeform's shelf.

You know, if you count what's in a bubble, then there's no surprise that it's all within ...that bubble, yes. It's not half of any network, it's just that bubble (for all it may seem as oh no, there isn't nor could there possibly be if "we" don't know about it) anything else or anything more.

By: whaack

whaack — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 23:47:44 +0000

Strictly trb, sorry.

By: Stanislav Datskovskiy

Stanislav Datskovskiy — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 23:39:08 +0000

Entire machine restarted?! please let me know right away (and save the system log!) if happens again.

Or was this strictly TRB ?

By: whaack

whaack — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 23:02:38 +0000

I've been thinking about this and it seems to me to be a matter of "it's better to be right than to be principled." If there are actually only a small number of people in the world who are concerned about making sure that there are no holes in the signed transaction graph from coinbases to utxos then it seems prudent to bypass the slow and clunky trb sync process and get full nodes running in as many places as possible by whatever means necessary - i.e. flying hard drives all over the map. It's not like we have to pick between one of two strategies. We can have some nodes syncing with the "traditional" method while others are speed-boosted.

P.S. I've already had to restart my node on your rack twice. Once it shutdown by itself, for unknown reasons (and I did not save the debug.log file, a mistake I'll try to avoid in the future.) The second time bitcoind was stuck on block 190919 for a couple of hours. It seemed to be running just fine but...no progress. So I kill'd it and started it back up again and it seems to be syncing slowly but surely.

By: Stanislav Datskovskiy

Stanislav Datskovskiy — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 22:42:27 +0000

whaack: I'll gladly give folks a copy of blk* from either of my nodes, but historically do not like doing so -- arguably it is even more "ecologically dirty" than "tempting" people to park 9000 nodes inside one cabinet. The risk is that TRB bring-up could be broken/dysfunctional and the folks using the "cheat" won't know.

Arguably this has already happened, to an extent: I personally have not synced a node "from empty disk" for several years, and thus not given the slow/bumpy sync mechanism the attention it deserves.

By: whaack

whaack — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 22:38:05 +0000

It certainly doesn't seem healthy and it is something that has to be actively fought against since the convenience/integration/price offered by your service makes going to another ISP a relative pain in the ass. In any case I'm going to see if there are any datacenter in CR where I can colocate a box.

And speaking of convenience, have you considered offering a box to come with signed tarball of blk000*.dat data to speed up the sync? This is data I would pay for, I would like to avoid waiting 30-60 days before I can test my block explorer on an up-to-date node.

By: Stanislav Datskovskiy

Stanislav Datskovskiy — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 21:29:40 +0000

> It seems like half of the network resides on asciilifeform's shelf...

May well be true, in re TRB; and IMHO this kind of thing is not healthy. (And e.g. BingoBoingo is working on standing up geographically dispersed nodes, last I recall. So hopefully will be remedied.)

But it does seem to be the case that every subscriber to date starts off with "I have a box, so why not a TRB node?" and I'm not in the biz of telling them not to. FWIW on avg. a TRB eats ~100kB/s. in both directions; they are not a palpable bandwidth sink.