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Node Maintainence

Binary​

All the clients are suggested to upgrade to the latest release. The latest version is supposed to be more stable and has better performance.

Storage​

Prune State​

According to the test, the performance of a full node will degrade when the storage size reaches a high volume (previously it was 1.5TB, which is an experimental value, the latest number needs to be updated). We suggest that the fullnode always keep light storage by pruning the storage.

Rules for Pruning​

  1. Do not try to prune an archive node. Archive nodes need to maintain ALL historic data by definition.
  2. Ensure there is at least 40 GB of storage space still available on the disk that will be pruned. Failures have been reported with ~25GB of free space.
  3. Geth is fully sync'd
  4. Geth has finished creating a snapshot that is at least 128 blocks old. This is true when "state snapshot generation" is no longer reported in the logs.

How to prune:​

  1. Stop the geth process
  2. Run the prune command

nohup geth --datadir ~/node snapshot prune-state > . /prune.log 2>&1 &

  1. Check prune.log, wait for the prune operation to complete, and start geth.

The maintainers should always have a few backup nodes in case one of the nodes is getting pruned. The hardware is also important, make sure the SSD meets: 4TB of free disk space, solid-state drive(SSD), gp3, 8k IOPS, 250MB/S throughput, read latency <1ms.

Prune Ancient Data in Real Time​

Ancient data is block data that is already considered immutable. This is determined by a threshold which is currently set at 90000. This means that blocks older than 90000 are considered ancient data. We recommend the --prunceancient flag to users who don't care about the ancient data. This is also advised for users who want to save disk space since this will only keep data for the latest 90000 blocks. Note that once this flag is turned on, the ancient data will not be recovered again and you cannot go back running your node without this flag in the start-up command.

How to use the flag:

./geth --tries-verify-mode none --config /server/config.toml --datadir /server/node --cache 8000 --rpc.allow-unprotected-txs --txlookuplimit 0 --pruneancient=true --syncmode=full

Prune Block Tools​

Core offers the offline feature to prune undesired ancient block data. It will discard block, receipt, and header in the ancient database to save space.

How to prune:

  1. Stop the Geth process.
  2. Run the following command
./geth snapshot prune-block --datadir /server/node --datadir.ancient ./chaindata/ancient --block-amount-reserved 1024

block-amount-reserved is the number of ancient data blocks that you want to keep after pruning.

Light Storage​

When the node crashes or been force killed, the node will sync from a block that was a few minutes or a few hours ago. This is because the state in memory is not persisted into the database in real time, and the node needs to replay blocks from the last checkpoint once it start. The replaying time depends on the configuration TrieTimeout in the config.toml. We suggest you raise it if you can tolerate with long replaying time, so the node can keep light storage.

Upgrade Geth​

Please read this guide