The status of the latest public testnet

In this post I will keep everyone updated on the latest testnet. gaia-6002 has crashed last night. We will not attempt to recover it, but will rather focus on getting to gaia-7000 faster.

Our next public testnet will be gaia-700. It will launch around the 5th or 6th of July 2018. We’ll be publishing a genesis.json file using the old keys from the previous testnet.

The testnet parameters will change to these:

Liveness: 20,000/40,000 blocks (gives everyone 24 hours to come back online)
Liveness Slashing: 1%
Safety Slashing: 20%
Jail Time: 12 blocks (1 minute)
Block Time: 5 seconds (should make it easier to catch up and sync)

If you have any questions or suggestions for anyone, please post them here.

Hello Adrian ! How do you guys enforce 5 seconds blocktime ?

It’s a config parameter in Tendermint consensus, where you can configure the timeouts for your local node. So by default most nodes will wait 5 seconds before they continue to the next consensus round.

Currently it’s not possible to enforce this in consensus, but as long as a majority of operators run it in that configuration, we should be fine.

How about opening a window for others to submit info to be added to the genesis file?

Just an update here. We have identified a number of issues from the gaia-6002 testnet and have a tracking issue:

Issue: staking/slashing: gaia-6002 debugging tracker

To be understood & resolved prior to next testnet:
Known bugs
 #1567
 #1519
 #1513
 #1510
User reports
 #1496
 #1484
 #1466
 #1457
 #1435
 #1431
...

We will be resolving these issues before we launch gaia-7000

Great, waiting anxious.

Then all of us should config the timeout with the same configurations. What if some of us have different timeout values?

I think this would only be a problem if the majority of validators would use a smaller timeout value. Then those with the 5s config would lag behind and probably be slashed…But if the majority uses 5s, there shouldn’t be a problem, I think.

I would hope this can be done with the SDK when the chain is being initialized. This was how the create_empty_block=false can be configured before. I’m kinda waiting this feature back as it will reduce the disk usage and easier for debugging as only block with transactions will be created.

# EmptyBlocks mode and possible interval between empty blocks in seconds
create_empty_blocks = true
create_empty_blocks_interval = 5

Like this? I tried it with the latest gaiad, basecoind, and democoind and still got 1 second blocks with create_empty_blocks_interval = 5.

Also, like @kwunyeung, I’d be very excited to see

create_empty_blocks = false 

start working again, or be something that we can set in the SDK.

Thanks!

jacobgadikian:

create_empty_blocks_interval = 5

Jacob, which version of SDK are you using? As we have tried with v0.19 before and this value didn’t have any effect on our testnet.

I have discussed with @suyu before and she told me about the timeout settings in the config.toml. We have tried changing the timeout values below and the block creation slows down.

# All timeouts are in milliseconds
timeout_propose = 3000
timeout_propose_delta = 500
timeout_prevote = 1000
timeout_prevote_delta = 500
timeout_precommit = 1000
timeout_precommit_delta = 500
timeout_commit = 1000

Make sure you keep the following option to false.

# Make progress as soon as we have all the precommits (as if TimeoutCommit = 0)
skip_timeout_commit = false

yes,

I increase timeout_commit = 1000 to 10x and the block interval is about 10s.

Do we have a current target date? I remember seeing somewhere the original target range was July 5-7.

Hi @adrian, any news about gaia-7000
I feel like trying it

Thank you thank you thank you!

@suyu
@kwunyeung

you are welcome

Just to update, we have a RC for the next testnet that we are running on an internal testnet. We will be starting the next testnet sometime this week. Please stay tuned for updates.