Gnosis Core Devs Call July 24, 2024

Summary

During a technical call, the team discussed various issues including a car strike affecting airport operations, latency improvements in blockchain technology, and the development of a public dashboard. They also addressed recent updates in infrastructure, research, testing, and client software, including a hot fix for a post-merge network issue. The call concluded with a discussion on the timeline, root cause, and fix for a recent incident involving block production.

Takeaways

• 😀 The meeting attendees discussed the impact of a car strike that led to one person having to sleep in the airport, with issues in Split being mentioned.
• 🛂 An airport in Split experienced a technological meltdown with no computers working, leading to manual handling of flight announcements, tickets, and check-ins.
• 👀 There was suspicion that the car strike might be blamed for the airport issues, but it was suggested that it could be a more technical issue with systems needing rebooting.
• 🔄 The meeting covered updates on infrastructure, with the new cluster migration working as expected and no issues reported from Gateway.
• 📊 A dashboard was introduced for latency improvements and system status observation, with a backend observing incoming transactions and their inclusion into the blockchain.
• 🔍 The team is researching latency issues and working with Nethermind and validators to identify the root causes of latency problems.
• 🚀 Aragon 3's first Alpha version was released, offering significant improvements such as faster state archiving and transaction-level state history granularity.
• 🛠️ A hotfix version 1.2.7.1 of a client was released to address a caching mechanism issue found in post-houra networks, which could cause corruption in certain scenarios.
• 🔄 The team is working on getting Shadow to work, facing issues with block production and debugging contract creation failures.
• 🔒 A discussion about system contract tracing was had, with the need for a way to trace system contract calls to help with debugging.
• 📝 The meeting concluded with a recap of a recent incident involving block production issues on a network, the root cause, and the quick fix implemented.

Q & A

What was the initial issue discussed in the meeting?

The initial issue discussed was the impact of a car strike on travel, with one participant having to sleep in the airport due to flight disruptions.

What was the problem at the Split airport?

The problem at the Split airport was a complete technological meltdown, with no computers working, manual flight announcements, handrawn tickets, and manual check-ins.

What was the impact of the technological meltdown on the airport operations?

The impact included manual processing of transactions, no sitting software assignation, and the bar processing transactions by cash and writing everything down manually.

What is the purpose of the dashboard being developed in the meeting?

The dashboard is being developed to observe the status of the system, including incoming transactions, decryption key messages, and their inclusion into the blog.

What is the current status of the network according to the dashboard?

The current status of the network shows not a lot of activity, and the number of transactions and keys included is being monitored.

What is the issue with the block being built without transactions?

The issue is that the keys don't arrive in time, and the cutoff is currently hardcoded to 3 seconds into the block, which might be causing delays.

What is the plan for improving latency?

The plan includes building a dashboard, working with Nethermind and the validators to bring down latency, and potentially making the latency value configurable.

What is the current status of the Hive test?

The Hive test is being developed with a technical plan divided into five parts, with part one already merged and work ongoing on part two.

What was the issue with the NEthermind client?

There was a hotfix released for NEthermind version 1271 to address an issue with aggressive caching mechanisms that caused potential corruption in caching mechanisms.

What is the significance of the release of Aragon 3?

Aragon 3 brings significant improvements such as the ability to archive notes in a matter of hours and reduced state history granularity from block level to transaction level.

What is the current issue with Shadow?

There are two issues with Shadow: one is that it produces invalid blocks, and the other is a more difficult-to-debug issue related to contract creation failures.

What was the timeline and resolution of the issue with the NEthermind client?

The issue started with the release of version 1270, which had a pre-warming feature that caused problems. The workaround was to disable pre-warming, and a hotfix version 1271 was released to properly address the issue.

What is the current recommendation for validators running the NEthermind client?

The current recommendation is to run the 1271 experimental version for Shadow, as it has been updated to address the issues found in version 1270.