Network Stability Report: Kusama With Parachains
The Parachains Team has published their report on network performance after the completion of the first 5 auctions. The report focuses on 4 key areas:
- Candidate Production Stability: The effect of network noise is not worth considering at this time, as over these past days the parachains have not had enough time to be repeatedly exposed to every possible combination of backing validators. There seems to be a discrepancy between some parachains related to this metric:To solve the issues mentioned in this point of the report there is a short and a long-time solution to be implemented (more info on the report).
- Approval Voting Stats: approval voting protocol is responsible for providing most of the security of parachains. Some incidents were registered, with a failsafe at 50 blocks which is being hit very occasionally, once every few weeks. These finality stall incidents are being investigated at the moment and the team will soon propose a solution to governance.
- Network Connectivity: On Kusama, there are 900 validators, and every session 200 of them are randomly selected to participate in parachain consensus. Some validators seem to be over-connected (connected to most of the other 899 validators on the validation peer-set): This poses no problem for correctness but does present an opportunity for efficiency, while some validators are under-connected. Despite this, none of the validators have fewer than 100 connections, and therefore information should be gossiped to the validators.
- Load: Most validators are in the 1.5-2 core utilization band. The team’s current recommendation is for validators to run with 4 core CPUs, so CPU utilization is within expectation.
Overall, the network is running smoothly. Parachain block production, approvals, and finality are stable with occasional incidents relating to temporary stalls of block finalization: These stalls are being caught by a failsafe and thus were not detrimental, but the underlying cause is being investigated and a solution to remedy this will be proposed. These results seem to suggest that there are no roadblocks to further parachains being added to Kusama Network.
The link to the full report can be found HERE. You can leave your questions and comments here or in the Direction channel.
Comments (1)
Great article. I hope that we publish such technical reports more often. This helps me understand my validation operations more holistically.