Verbaltech2 - BitShares Witness Report

Sorry for the late report this month. Noticing the rapid changes going on with prices I will note a few here for future reference as of this report (all prices via CMC): BTC=$2897.35, BTS=$0.365, STEEM=$2.39, PPY=(not yet listed). I have lots of information to share so I'll get right to it.

I have been extremely busy so far this month upgrading servers, software and expanding into PeerPlays. Much of the frenzy was due to participating the the PeerPlays testnet while also upgrading the BitShares nodes I support. Now that PeerPlays has graduated the testnet and moved into production I have some room to breath.

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I now run 8 nodes for these chains. I also have a 32GB dedicated server I can use for both the PeerPlays and BitShares testnets. Sometime this month it will be joining the BitShares testnet @xeroc has been trying to start with BitShares.eu.

I will defer the discussion of the PeerPlays witness operation to my official announcement as witness for Baxter's Sports, to be posted before the end of this weekend.

All but 1 of the BitShares nodes are now dedicated servers. Two are dedicated 32GB, 8 core systems the others are 16GB. I will likely upgrade the last VPS to a dedicated server as well, but with the latest release RAM for the witness_node is significantly reduced for nodes with the history plugins enabled. To save RAM and speed replay I disabled both history plugins, which provides the greatest savings of RAM. Here is a graph showing the difference between a node without history (lower value) and the new release with history plugins enabled but with tracking for only a few accounts. As you can see it's not much increase over the no history version. Thank you Peter Conrad!

Previously I had to run the feed node with full history to support the price feed for the BitTwenty (BTWTY) asset. I tried to use the partial-operations patch that Peter Conrad created but could not get it to work on the price feed node for the BitTwenty asset. I later learned of a long standing bug in the witness_node that will not allow multiple parameters of the same type in the config.ini file where I place all operational parameters. Even the commented template it produces has erroneous info. I also discovered that despite the comments relative file pathnames do not always work.

I have upgraded the bts_tools from version 0.4.11 to 0.4.12 on all nodes as well. Two more revisions of the bts_tools were made to support PeerPlays, but I have only upgraded one node to the 0.4.14 release of the tools to check for any impact on the BitShares configuration. I will be upgrading the others to 0.4.14 soon.

One of the most significant and time consuming efforts was perfecting a new scheme for launching the witness_node upon system startup using systemd service units. I employed 2 types of units, as system wide scoped unit which I used to start the witness_node and a user session scoped service to manage a tmux session with separate window panes for real-time viewing the log file produced by the witness node, a pane for the cli_wallet, one for the bts_tools which also provides a web interface and price feeds, and another for general purpose use or to run builds that create the cli and witness programs. I intend to write a separate article describing this scheme in detail. The hard part was getting the systemd user session working on a system without an X-Windows GUI. What a rabbit hole! It should make for an interesting article for the geeks out there. Here is a screenshot of the tmux session on one node.