Steem has been alive for over 2 years and over 20 million blocks!
Happy Birthday!
(Yeah… I know, I am a bit late for the party)
Full HD video rendered exclusively for my witness updatesSteem Pressure Series
As you already know, this year I started writing “Steem Pressure”, which is a series of posts aimed at showing you how steemd works in its natural habitat.
Introducing
This post introduced the series and gave you the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", including Steem, and showed you some statistics on how rapidly Steem is growing.
Toys for boys and girls
This post explained hardware requirements and the amount of data to process, and suggested a simple benchmark on how to distinguish between the “so-so”, “uh-oh,” and “no-no” types of storage backend.
Steem Node 101
In this post, I explained what you need to do to set up your first node from scratch.
In the next episode, I will show you the performance differences between various setups and how quickly they can replay up to 20M blocks to give you some reference data.
64GB for a basic node? No!
It’s not true that a consensus node needs 64GB of RAM.
Of course, putting both the shared memory file and the block_log in RAM would significantly speed up the resync/replay process, but in most cases you don’t need that, and it’s fine to run on smaller boxes for daily usage. Will your node benefit from more RAM? Yes. Do you really need that much? No.
More on that in the next episodes of Steem Pressure.
Sandboxes and playgrounds
I have recently run a lot of experiments with my nodes, trying to avoid touching the ones that are made for general public use and can’t hold us back forever. All that because of the upcoming great features that need to be tested, and I encourage developers and witnesses to do the same. Some of those are not yet production-ready, so of course you need separate environments.
Some compatibility constraints have been holding me back, so I haven’t implemented any cutting edge solutions in my public nodes. You might have experienced some limits in the number of requests allowed per second on public interfaces.
RPC endpoint
From now on, I will be providing https://api.steem.house as the main public RPC endpoint.
Please consider wss://gtg.steem.house:8090 obsolete.
JSON RPC 2.0 requests coming there will be redirected internally to the main endpoint.
During the testing and transition phase, please expect to be routed to some backup nodes, even ones provided by third parties.
Private/Non-public RPC endpoints
If you need a high-performance Steem infrastructure for your own needs (that empower Steem platform), feel free to contact me.
block_log
Up-to-date blockchain data
available for download at:
https://gtg.steem.house/get/blockchain/
or if you prefer:
Periodically updated, highly compressed blockchain data
available for download at:
https://gtg.steem.house/get/blockchain.xz
(compatible with parallel, indexed xz)
Witnesses are the servants of the platform
Surprise!
No. You shouldn’t be surprised.
Thanks to @berniesanders “DO ANY OF THESE WITNESSES DO ANYTHING?”, some questions were asked about witnesses and what they are expected to do. I strongly disagree with content (I believe that many of the top witnesses criticized there bring a lot of value to the platform), but I upvoted it regardless, because I think that bringing the witness-thing close to the public is always a good idea. And I have to hand it to Bernie that he knows how to grab people’s attention. (Attention-Bernie syndrome)
Some think that the role of a witness also involves bringing you the latest newspaper and making you coffee. Some think that it’s enough to just run some software on your home-grown, potato-grade PC. The role of a witness is not about either of these things.
The Delegated Proof of Stake algorithm clearly defines our role here.
Stakeholders chose witnesses as trusted parties, guardians of the consensus and reliable block producers.
If you are not trustworthy or reliable, you lose your votes.
All witnesses have their own ways to gain trust and prove their dedication to the platform.
It’s up to YOU to decide what is most important.
Just please: vote for witnesses.
I would love to believe that everyone who upvoted this post votes for at least one witness (not necessarily me :-) ).
I’m very curious about how many of the users who upvoted this post and posted comments actually vote for witnesses. After all that’s witness-category. I would love to see 90% (and the remaining 10% being undecided) But I know that my wishes are different from the reality.
If you believe I can be of value to Steem, please vote for me (gtg) as a witness on Steemit's Witnesses List or set (gtg) as a proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Your vote does matter!
You can contact me directly on steem.chat, as Gandalf
Steem On