The Vertex type unifies branches, extensions and leaves into a single
memory area where the larges member is the branch (128 bytes + overhead) -
the payloads we have are all smaller than 128 thus wrapping them in an
extra layer of `ref` is wasteful from a memory usage perspective.
Further, the ref:s must be visited during the M&S phase of garbage
collection - since we keep millions of these, many of them
short-lived, this takes up significant CPU time.
```
Function CPU Time: Total CPU Time: Self Module Function (Full) Source File Start Address
system::markStackAndRegisters 10.0% 4.922s nimbus system::markStackAndRegisters(var<system::GcHeap>).constprop.0 gc.nim 0x701230`
```
* Extract `CoreDb` constructor helpers from `base.nim` into separate module
why:
This makes it easier to avoid circular imports.
* Extract `Ledger` constructor helpers from `base.nim` into separate module
why:
Move `accounts_ledger.nim` file to sub-folder `backend`. That way the
layout resembles that of the `core_db`.
* Updates and corrections
* Extract `CoreDb` configuration from `base.nim` into separate module
why:
This makes it easier to avoid circular imports, in particular
when the capture journal (aka tracer) is revived.
* Extract `Ledger` configuration from `base.nim` into separate module
why:
This makes it easier to avoid circular imports (if any.)
also:
Move `accounts_ledger.nim` file to sub-folder `backend`. That way the
layout resembles that of the `core_db`.
- EpochAccumulator got renamed to EpochRecord
- MasterAccumulator is not HistoricalHashesAccumulator
- The List size for the accumulator got a different maximum which
also result in a different encoding and HTR
hike allocations (and the garbage collection maintenance that follows)
are responsible for some 10% of cpu time (not wall time!) at this point
- this PR avoids them by stepping through the layers one step at a time,
simplifying the code at the same time.
* Rename `newKvt()` -> `ctx.getKvt()`
why:
Clean up legacy shortcut. Also, the `KVT` returned is not instantiated
but refers to the shared `KVT` that resides in a context which is a
generalisation of an in-memory database fork. The function `ctx`
retrieves the default context.
* Rename `newTransaction()` -> `ctx.newTransaction()`
why:
Clean up legacy shortcut. The transaction is applied to a context as a
generalisation of an in-memory database fork. The function `ctx`
retrieves the default context.
* Rename `getColumn(CtGeneric)` -> `getGeneric()`
why:
No more a list of well known sub-tries needed, a single one is enough.
In fact, `getColumn()` did only support a single sub-tree by now.
* Reduce TODO list
This trivial bump should improve performance a bit without costing too
much memory - as the trie grows, so does the number of levels in it and
creating hikes becomes ever more expensive - hopefully this cache
increase should give a nice little boost even if it's not a lot.
Avoid writing the same slot/hash values to the hash->slot mapping
to avoid spamming the rocksdb WAL and cause unnecessary compaction
In the same vein, avoid writing trivially detectable A-B-A storage
changes which happen with surprising frequency.
Introduce a new `StoData` payload type similar to `AccountData`
* slightly more efficient storage format
* typed api
* fewer seqs
* fix encoding docs - it wasn't rlp after all :)
* Enable LTO compilation
Similar to nimbus-eth2, LTO gives a significant boost for any CPU-bound operations such as the EVM.
The options are copied straight from nimbus-eth2 - for example at block height 1.7M there's a computation-heavy section where we can see a 15%-20% improvement in block processing time.
```
bps_x bps_y tps_x tps_y time_x time_y bpsd tpsd timed
(1722223, 1733334] 102.52 138.90 1,049.67 1,420.61 2m41s 1m58s 35.78% 35.78% -26.32%
```
* avoid defer
When evmc recursion is enabled together with LTO, we run out of stack
space.
`defer` creates an exception handling context that takes up hundreds of
bytes of stack space - now that the EVM is no longer using exceptions,
we can safely get rid of it.
This significantly speeds up block import at the cost of less protection
against invalid data, potentially resulting in an invalid database
getting stored.
The risk is small given that import is used only for validated data -
evaluating the right level of of validation vs performance is left for a
future PR.
A side effect of this approach is that there is no cached stated root in
the database - computing it currently requires a lot of memory since the
intermediate roots get cached in memory in full while the computation is
ongoing - a future PR will need to address this deficiency, for example
by streaming the already-computed hashes directly to the database.
The state and account MPT:s currenty share key space in the database
based on that vertex id:s are assigned essentially randomly, which means
that when two adjacent slot values from the same contract are accessed,
they might reside at large distance from each other.
Here, we prefix each vertex id by its root causing them to be sorted
together thus bringing all data belonging to a particular contract
closer together - the same effect also happens for the main state MPT
whose nodes now end up clustered together more tightly.
In the future, the prefix given to the storage keys can also be used to
perform range operations such as reading all the storage at once and/or
deleting an account with a batch operation.
Notably, parts of the API already supported this rooting concept while
parts didn't - this PR makes the API consistent by always working with a
root+vid.
The storage id is frequently accessed when executing contract code and
finding the path via the database requires several hops making the
process slow - here, we add a cache to keep the most recently used
account storage id:s in memory.
A possible future improvement would be to cache all account accesses so
that for example updating the balance doesn't cause several hikes.
* CoreDb: Merged all sub-descriptors into `base_desc` module
* Dissolve `aristo_db/common_desc.nim`
* No need to export `Aristo` methods in `CoreDb`
* Resolve/tighten methods in `aristo_db` sub-moduled
why:
So they can be straihgt implemented into the `base` module
* Moved/re-implemented `KVT` methods into `base` module
* Moved/re-implemented `MPT` methods into `base` module
* Moved/re-implemented account methods into `base` module
* Moved/re-implemented `CTX` methods into `base` module
* Moved/re-implemented `handler_{aristo,kvt}` into `aristo_db` module
* Moved/re-implemented `TX` methods into `base` module
* Moved/re-implemented base methods into `base` module
* Replaced `toAristoSavedStateBlockNumber()` by proper base method
why:
Was the last for keeping reason for keeping low level backend access
methods
* Remove dedicated low level access to `Aristo` backend
why:
Not needed anymore, for debugging the descriptors can be accessed
directly
also:
some clean up stuff
* Re-factor `CoreDb` descriptor layout and adjust base methods
* Moved/re-implemented iterators into `base_iterator*` modules
* Update docu
These representations use ~15-20% less data compared to the status quo,
mainly by removing redundant zeroes in the integer encodings - a
significant effect of this change is that the various rocksdb caches see
better efficiency since more items fit in the same amount of space.
* use RLP encoding for `VertexID` and `UInt256` wherever it appears
* pack `VertexRef`/`PayloadRef` more tightly
- Use --portal-rpc-url as url option to connect to Portal JSON-RPC
interface, just as --web3-url for EL JSON RPC interface.
- Improve logging to know beter which call on which JSON-RPC
interface fails
* avoid costly hike memory allocations for operations that don't need to
re-traverse it
* avoid unnecessary state checks (which might trigger unwanted state
root computations)
* disable optimize-for-hits due to the MPT no longer being complete at
all times
* Update some docu
* Resolve obsolete compile time option
why:
Not optional anymore
* Update checks
why:
The notion of what constitutes a valid `Aristo` db has changed due to
(even more) lazy calculating Merkle hash keys.
* Disable redundant unit test for production
* Use simpler schema when writing transactions, receipts, and withdrawals
Using MPT not only slow but also take up more spaces than needed.
Aristo will remove older tries and only keep the last block tries.
Using simpler schema will avoid those problems.
* Rename getTransaction to getTransactionByIndex