This Week in Lotus - Week 12 - 2023

🚢 v1.21.0-rc1

We shipped the first release candidate for Lotus v1.21.0 this week. It´s a rather big feature release with numerous improvements and enhancements for node operators, ETH RPC-providers and storage providers. Please read carefully through the ☢️ Upgrade Warnings ☢️ section, as well as the Highlights section.

Some of the highlights are:

• SplitStore improvements
• RPC API improvements
• Experimental scheduler assigners for storage providers
• CLI speedups

(Check the full release notes here.)[https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/releases/tag/v1.21.0-rc1]

⏪ Syncing issues 🏃‍♂️

We are aware of nodes with heavy RPC loads having issues keeping in sync, ⏰ and we have a current sprint on fixing these issue, as well as speeding up RPC calls.

For ETH RPC operators the syncing issues stems from RPC calls taking a lot of time, as well as the increased usage after FEVM landed on the mainnet.

Storage providers has seen issues keeping in sync when a lot of messages are pushed into mpool. We have a clear reproduction of the issue, and currently testing out a fix. We will backport these fixes to the v1.21.0 release 🚝

A big thanks to everyone that has been helping identifying the underlying issues and helping testing out fixes. We truly appreciate it!! We have 🩸 edge patch here that shows convincing improvements, but we will come back when we have final confirmations that it fixes the issues.

A lot of users have also noticed that catching up sync from a snapshot is taking a lot longer these day. This is largely related to the built-in market actor consuming a lot of computational demand for block validation. A FIP for a short-term mitigation for this is currently in Last Call and will be included network version 19 upgrade if accepted. You can read the FIP here

The Infra team is also working on making significant improvements to the snapshots creation.

That’s it for the week! Have a great weekend! ☀️