Hive consensus node - simple way
Requirements:
Hardware: x86-64, 32GB RAM, 1TB fast storage (SSD / NVMe)
Software: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Assumptions:
We act as user hive with uid 1000 and HOME=/home/hive
We use screen for convenience.
We use /home/hive/datadir as a data dir for our node.
Use cases:
Simple, yet versatile configuration that can be used to spawn a node that serves as a:
seed
Take part in a P2P network. By default listen at publicly available TCP port 2001.
witness
Witnesses, a.k.a. block producers play an essential role on Hive. In this case, you don’t want to open webserver ports to the public or enable non-essential plugins such as account_history. Make sure that you set values for witness and private-key.
exchange
Exchanges need to track account history entries for a list of accounts they use for deposits and withdrawals. For that reason such accounts have to be specified in config files (see example entries). Each time you add a new account to be tracked, you have to perform a replay.
personal wallet
You might want to have a node for personal needs to handle your accounts. Configure it just like the exchange, except you will track your own account(s).
basic API
A consensus node has a basic, yet powerful API. It can return useful information about the current state of the blockchain, track the head block, return blocks with get_block API, and broadcast transactions, which might be just good enough to handle some bots or apps.
Prepare directory tree
mkdir -pv ~/datadir/{blockchain,snapshot} ~/bin
Use example config file
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/snapshot/exchange/example-exchange-config.ini -O ~/datadir/config.ini
Get hived and cli_wallet binaries
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/bin/hived-1.27.6 -nc -P ~/bin
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/bin/cli_wallet-1.27.6 -nc -P ~/bin
chmod u+x ~/bin/{hived,cli_wallet}-1.27.6
Run hived
Of course you need to make sure it won’t be killed when you disconnect (use screen, or configure it as a service), make sure that the configuration fits your needs (tracking accounts, bind ports to public interfaces or to localhost, etc.)
~/bin/hived-1.27.6 -d /home/hive/datadir
That’s it.
It will start sync process during which /home/hive/datadir/blockchain/block_log and /home/hive/datadir/blockchain/block_log.artifacts will be created and updated as it will sync and process blocks coming from the Hive p2p network. As the blocks are processed the current state is being saved in the /home/hive/datadir/blockchain/shared_memory.bin file. If you track account history then there’s also /home/hive/datadir/blockchain/account-history-rocksdb-storage which is RocksDB storage with account history data.
Optional steps and improvements
Use tmpfs for shared_memory.bin file
It’s worth mentioning that /home/hive/datadir/blockchain/shared_memory.bin will be heavily accessed for read/write. Placing this file on tmpfs will speed up resync and replay, and will reduce I/O on the storage. The disadvantage is that it will not survive the reboot. You also need to have enough RAM / swap.
To use tmpfs, uncomment this line in config.ini file:
# shared-file-dir = "/run/hive"
And prepare that location for storing shared_memory.bin file:
sudo mkdir /run/hive
sudo chown -Rc hive:hive /run/hive
sudo mount -o remount,size=30G /run
Use existing block_log
If you already have a block_log file you can use it to speed up the process. In such a case place it in ~/datadir/blockchain and use --replay.
You can use a block_log from another instance you run or download from public sources (see: https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain )
You can safely reuse block_log from older versions.
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain/block_log -nc -P ~/datadir/blockchain
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain/block_log.artifacts -nc -P ~/datadir/blockchain
Please note that the block_log is roughly 500GB, downloading it could take a significant amount of time (6-12 hours even with a decent network connection)
Use a snapshot
Snapshot can apply the state of the blockchain that was generated on a different machine. It’s tightly bound to the version that was used to generate it and the exact configuration (used plugins, etc.). Make sure that you have lbzip2 installed (sudo apt install lbzip2). Regular bzip2 will also work, but lbzip2 makes use of all available CPU threads. To use snapshot you also need a block_log that is at least as fresh at snapshot itself.
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/snapshot/exchange/latest.tar.bz2 -O - | lbzip2 -dc | tar xvC /home/hive/datadir/snapshot
When using snapshot use --load-snapshot=latest (where the ‘latest’ is the name of the snapshot)
TL;DR: Complete optimized recipe
screen -q # start the screen manager
mkdir -pv ~/datadir/{blockchain,snapshot} ~/bin
sudo mkdir /run/hive
sudo chown -Rc hive:hive /run/hive
sudo mount -o remount,size=30G /run
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain/block_log -nc -P ~/datadir/blockchain
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/blockchain/block_log.artifacts -nc -P ~/datadir/blockchain
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/snapshot/exchange/latest.tar.bz2 -O - | lbzip2 -dc | tar xvC /home/hive/datadir/snapshot
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/bin/hived-1.27.6 -nc -P ~/bin
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/bin/cli_wallet-1.27.6 -nc -P ~/bin
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/snapshot/exchange/example-exchange-config.ini -O ~/datadir/config.ini
sed -i '/^# shared-file-dir/s/^# //' ~/datadir/config.ini # enable tmpfs location
chmod u+x ~/bin/{hived,cli_wallet}-1.27.6
~/bin/hived-1.27.6 -d /home/hive/datadir --load-snapshot=latest
Upgrading from previous version
If your instance is already configured this way, then upgrade is very easy:
rm -rf /home/hived/datadir/snapshot/latest
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/bin/hived-1.27.6 -nc -P ~/bin
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/bin/cli_wallet-1.27.6 -nc -P ~/bin
chmod u+x ~/bin/{hived,cli_wallet}-1.27.6
wget https://gtg.openhive.network/get/snapshot/exchange/latest.tar.bz2 -O - | lbzip2 -dc | tar xvC /home/hive/datadir/snapshot
Stop current instance and start with new binary:
~/bin/hived-1.27.6 -d /home/hive/datadir --load-snapshot=latest
Estimated times:
Sync (from scratch) - 36h
Replay (if you already have a block_log) - 18h
Load from snapshot (if you already have a block_log) - 1h
Thanks. I followed all the steps. Once they finally got the flames under control and I was allowed to gather whatever I could salvage, people wanted answers. So I quickly pulled this post up and started reading it out loud. Even they understood.
Modern day Prometheus! ;-)
Why 30G though? Isn't it enough to be of the size of
shared_memory.bin? In that case setting both the size of shm and ram-disk to 22G should still have decent margin (4-5G).12 hours is only a bit less than syncing from scratch through p2p, so downloading in that case is not a viable solution 😁
So, I guess the version supporting split block log is the next one, right?
/runthat I use in my way of setting things up is a system-wide place to store various run-time data, so I can't use all of it. I use higher values because I keep same setup scripts for other nodes, and for my fully featured account history node it's already:du -csh /run/hive/shared_memory.bin:But that doesn't matter much, the configured size limit doesn't pre-allocate RAM. It simply sets an upper boundary on how much space can be used.
I'm not that sure if it's just a bit less, one of my recent sync tests (6 weeks ago) took me 42 hours. I'm afraid that you might be too optimistic about sync speed in real life conditions.
Yes! :-) I can't wait for that. Unfortunately being a most used block_log provider I have to wait for global adoption. Or do I? :-) Once it's officially released I will switch :-D
Damn you 😡 It is still going. You were right and I remembered it wrong. I've dug out a 15 months old results of full sync and it was running over 37 hours up to 72M+. Compared to that current version appears to be slightly faster, but still couple times slower than what I thought it would be.
To be honest it smells like a bug (or more optimistically - as an optimization opportunity). There are couple of hiccups when node is not receiving blocks fast enough, but for the most part block processing is reported at close to 100% time. On the other hand computer seems to be sleeping, using around single core only, which is weird, since decomposing signatures, that used to make sync 7 times slower than replay, since HF26 is supposedly done on multiple threads and preemptively, as soon as block arrives, so I'd expect at least some bursts of higher CPU activity. Maybe I should use some config option for that?
It would be nice to have a comparison on the same machine: pure replay vs replay with full validation vs sync.
Signatures are checked ahead of time in separate threads, and sufficient number of threads are default allocated.
Whenever you see block processing at 100%, then the bottleneck is the single-core speed of your system (it's processing operations and updating state).
The results are in:
4921cb8c4abe093fa173ebfb9340a94ddf5ace7aPerformance report (total).) -124225649 mswhich is34.5 hours, avg. block processing time (fromPerformance report at block) is1.423 ms/blockentering live mode) -143988777 mswhich is40 hours, avg. block processing time (fromSyncing Blockchain) is1.649 ms/blockI'm curious how @gtg measurements will look in comparison.
Sync to replay ratio shoots up the most in areas of low blockchain activity, which is understandable, since small blocks are processed faster than they can be acquired from network, but in other areas sync is still 10-20% slower.
And the likely reason I remembered sync as faster than that is due to difference in computer speed - my home computer appears to be over 60% faster than the one I was running above experiments on, which would mean it should almost fit the sync inside 24 hours.
For now I have results for first 50M blocks:
6:32:4543.466s61.132sx1.406411:03:0084.337s395.575sx4.690414:31:33103.266s182.288sx1.7652I just counted last 100k block times (cpu / real) so it's not a great measurement. I can have better numbers once I complete those runs. But it seems that replay with validation can somehow make a better use of multiple threads than validation during resync.
It might be the state undo logic slowing down blockchain processing in a sequential manner (this computation is probably skipped for replay+validate). But I doubt there is a way to disable it to check that, short of modifying the code for the test.
Probably we should modify the code dealing with checkpoints to skip undo logic up to the checkpoint. This would allow us to confirm if it is the bottleneck, and it would also give us a speedup when checkpoints are set if it turns out to be the bottleneck.
I just started syncing on latest develop, so I guess we will know soon enough 😄
I recommend using a named session with screen as well as logging the session.
screen -S witness -L -Logfile witness.logYou can then use my monitorwitness script to know if it falls behind,
https://github.com/officiallymarky/monitorwitness
Genius article - I should learn to follow it one day
Seeing this, maybe it is better to have more than 1 TB storage. People often store and run multiple things on their servers.
Sure, but that depends on use case. People who run hived node should know what they are doing. For example running a witness node assumes that nothig else runs on the same machine.
This is very helpful and hopefully will help more people to become witness's/node operators. !LUV
Alright this looks rather easy and now I'm going to be honest I'm seriously thinking about launching one and learning from people such as yourself. I used to run a number of nodes years ago for other blockchains. Thanks for the deets!
Thank you, this was very easy and quick - I didn't even wait for 36 hours and this congratulation arrived 😜
Thank you so much for this step by step guide. I have longed to get the one that is written like this.
This looks easy and smart, I have reblogged it for reference purposes.
I will revisit it once I purchase a server for the set-up.
Thank you once again.
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STOPThis now looks very easy
Kudos to you for your hard work!
I have zero knowledge about this. lol
Thanks, been looking into running a witness node. Now I just need the machine.
Thank you for the instructions :) Very useful indeed if I ever want to setup a Hive node :)
Thank you for the instructions
I'm glad people be doing all this but me. I do not want to blow my heads up trying to comprehend this post. It really amazing some commenters find it easy and useful. Kudos
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STOPI'm trying to get a Hive witness node up and running on a local machine (Intel i5 8400 64G RAM 1 Tb NVMe & 500Gb NVMe). I downloaded @gtg's blocklog and ran replay. It created a blocklog index that expanded to 462Gb and ate all the space on the 1Tb NVMe.
Is this supposed to happen? Can I move the index to the 2nd 500Gb NVMe which is empty?
I'm using @someguy123's Hive in a Box
There's no block_log.index file anymore, it was replaced by block_log.artifacts a while ago,
and regardless the name, it shouldn't be that big. Once you downloaded block_log from my site you could do the same with artifacts (it would save some time for regeneration if you have fast network, otherwise it might not be worth the hassle).
My instruction above is for this kind of deployment, I never used "in a box" stuff, so I don't know it's quirks and specifics.