Originally I planned to release in December, but just before the holidays kicked into full gear, I found an issue with the HAF upgrade process during my testing. The HAF upgrade process enables a node to update its software without having to do a full replay (a full replay takes several days, whereas an upgrade completes in minutes or less typically).
While this problem wouldn’t cause any immediate issue for API node operators, as they’re going to have to do a full replay for this release anyways, it would have required API nodes to do more full replays again, if we found any further problems after the release.
So based on this, I decided to delay the official release of the HAF API node suite until after the holidays when all our devs were back and we had a fix for the upgrade issue (which we now have).
So we’ll be releasing it officially this week. It’s available now as 1.27.7rc16 for anyone who wants to get a jump on replaying it.
Also, here’s a quick summary on some of what the BlockTrades team has been working on since my last report. As usual, it’s not a complete list. Red items are links in gitlab to the actual work done.
Mostly minor changes here recently.
Upcoming work will focus on an overhaul of the transaction signing system. Originally I had vague hopes we might be able to complete those changes in February, but realistically it’s likely to be at least some time in March/April time frame I think.
These changes will be included as part of the hardfork and they are also tightly related to the support for “Lite Accounts” using a HAF API (my plan is to offer a similar signing feature set across the two systems to keep things simple). So the Lite Account API will probably be rolled out on a similar time frame.
Most of the work done recently was performance optimizations made as a result of benchmark testing.
A huge amount of work was done to hivemind as part of our final optimization work prior to release. Below represents only a small portion of this work:
I expect we’ll officially release the Typescript version of wax in the next couple of weeks. Below is a sample of recently completed work:
- Added support for account authority update operation
- Improvements to key leakage detection
- Working on Python version of wax: now it can create and sign transactions, but currently only offline version is supported.
- Continuing work on a generic UI component for the health-checker.
In related work, we also created a handy new tool for managing submodule dependencies across HAF and HAF apps:
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/update_submodulesWhat's next?
We’ve essentially finished production testing for the rc16 HAF API node software, except for the final test of replacing it as our production software on api.hive.blog. We expect to complete that operation in the next few days (by Monday at the very latest).
We updated the release candidate testing server (
https://api.syncad.com) to rc16 today, and I recommend all apps do final testing against this API node ASAP, prior to the switchover on
https://api.hive.blog itself, to reduce the chance for a late discovery of compatibility issues that need to be adjusted for.
Once the software is officially released and running on api.hive.blog, I’ll make another post to provide some performance metrics for the new release and other information of interest.
