Hive witness update log #22: It has been quite some time...

Definitely an overdue post from me since my previous post that was 4 months ago.

HF25

Set to activate on 30 June 2021 at 14:00 UTC, that is in less than a week if the super-majority of the top 21 are running the new version by then.

I'm generally positive about the changes especially the ones that many of us wanted, such as vote expiration and recurrent transfers that subscription-based payment systems accepting HIVE/HBD will find useful.

As of writing this, 4 in the top 21 are signalling HF25 along with 12 backup witnesses including me.

With that said, it would take some time for techcoderx.com API node to be fully updated and synced as it has been facing various issues, from hived compiler errors (mostly segmentation faults) to the block_log file ended up being corrupted for no apparent reason.

I ended up ditching PopOS 20.04 for Ubuntu Server 20.04 (hence no GUI for now) to get hived to compile correctly and using rsync instead of wget to pull the block_log file from my witness server so that the integrity is verified as it downloads.

Dev updates

Not a lot to say here due to having to deal with endless issues (that is totally off-topic here) over here and will very likely get worse over time in the mid-term.

My first (and at this current moment, the only) PR on the Hive repo on renaming the legacy non-Appbase API namespace, that confused me a bit when I was working on the Jussi reverse proxy setup. Surprisingly they are still being used in libraries such as hive-js and API node monitors.

Although I did not manage to find the time to complete the main frontends of Alive Protocol, a small change will be made to the core protocol to reduce the amount of data being broadcasted to the blockchain by streamers as more data have been moved off-chain.

The rest are mostly the work on Avalon which deserves a separate post for it.

Witness performance

Not expecting this to do well given my inactivity :)

Current rank: 97th (active rank 86th)
Votes: 3,384 MVests
Voter count: 152

Producer rewards (7 days): 24.091 HP
Missed blocks: 2

Server resource statistics

This section will be present in every witness update logs (if any of my nodes are online) to provide new witnesses up-to-date information about the system requirements for running a Hive node.

hived (v1.24.8, MIRA, minimal)

block_log file size: 350 GB
blockchain folder size: 364 GB
RAM usage: 1.3 GB

Sadly MIRA is officially dead going forward, therefore this kind of low memory setup would no longer be possible. v1.24.8 is the last version where it will be supported.

hived (v1.25, minimal, currently producing)

I spun this node up temporarily to signal HF25 while working with my Hive API node issues. Same VPS specs as the main node above.

shared_memory.bin file size: 18 GB
Resident memory usage: 6.4 GB

And the rest of the metrics:

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