Discussions from the Solana Validator Community on operations, upcoming changes, and best practices.

Community Validator Discussions

solana community

The Solana validator community discusses validator updates for the Testnet and Mainnet-Beta cluster.  There is an issue with high disk IO during validator startup that is being debugged on Solana Tech discord channel debug-disk-io-catchup-issue.  The issue is not a blocker for the 1.14.x rollout on Mainnet-Beta.  Next, Richard Patel from Jump gives updates on the Firedancer client (an alternative validator client being built by Jump).

Video Contents:

0:00 Introduction and meeting agenda
0:46 Testnet and Mainnet-Beta validator updates
2:17 High IO issue on validator startup
5:37 Firedancer updates

Chat Logs:

00:03:17.176,00:03:20.176
Zantetsu: Doesn't the disabled disk index cause more memory usage?

00:03:19.050,00:03:22.050
Nick Garfield: Does the high disk IO usage extend beyond startup?

00:03:20.528,00:03:23.528
Zantetsu: In my experience it does

00:03:39.205,00:03:42.205
Zantetsu: Might put those who are using memory for accounts to go over the dge

00:05:19.872,00:05:22.872
Nick Garfield: 👍

00:05:27.181,00:05:30.181
Zantetsu: Great info thanks

00:07:09.184,00:07:12.184
Tim Garcia: https://twitter.com/jump_firedancer/status/1613582309629857815?s=20

00:07:25.852,00:07:28.852
Zantetsu: Do you develop/test on the same operating system as recommended by Solana Labs for their validator (Ubuntu 20.04 I believe)?

00:07:43.926,00:07:46.926
Zantetsu: Just wondering if there will be different OS requirements/recommendations with your node software

00:09:01.538,00:09:04.538
MCF MCF: is it possible to do benchmarking against hardware at this time?

00:09:12.311,00:09:15.311
Steve Czabaniuk: From their GH, they mention testing with "a stock GCP RHEL8.5 image":
https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer#host-setup

00:10:30.810,00:10:33.810
MCF MCF: firedancer

00:10:37.705,00:10:40.705
MCF MCF: performance benching

00:11:06.155,00:11:09.155
Cronchur The Dominator: Is there any branch where I can spin a frankendancer up on mainnet/testnet with ease?

00:11:46.935,00:11:49.935
Cronchur The Dominator: Right, iirc that one worked for solana-test-validator but not solana-validator

00:19:45.918,00:19:48.918
Cronchur The Dominator: Have we ever considered making QUIC window size proportional to latency? To account for the fact that throughput is already inversely proportional to window size?

00:20:04.397,00:20:07.397
Tim Garcia: https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer/discussions

00:20:19.173,00:20:22.173
Martin van Diggelen: Amazing work thank you for the detailed feedback

Solana Community Validator Discussion - February 16 2023