nimbus-eth1/nimbus/sync/beacon

Beacon Sync

According to the merge-first glossary, a beacon sync is a "Sync method that relies on devp2p and eth/6x to fetch headers and bodies backwards then apply these in the forward direction to the head state".

This glossary is used as a naming template for relevant entities described here. When referred to, names from the glossary are printed bold.

Syncing blocks is performed in two overlapping phases

• loading header chains and stashing them into a separate database table,
• removing headers from the stashed headers chain, fetching the block bodies the headers refer to and importing/executing them via persistentBlocks().

So this beacon syncer slightly differs from the definition in the glossary in that only headers are stashed on the database table and the block bodies are fetched in the forward direction.

The reason for that behavioural change is that the block bodies are addressed by the hash of the block headers for fetching. They cannot be fully verified upon arrival on the cheap (e.g. by a payload hash.) They will be validated not before imported/executed. So potentially corrupt blocks will be discarded. They will automatically be re-fetched with other missing blocks in the forward direction.

Header chains

The header chains are the triple of

• a consecutively linked chain of headers starting starting at Genesis
• followed by a sequence of missing headers
• followed by a consecutively linked chain of headers ending up at a finalised block header (earlier received from the consensus layer)

A sequence @[h(1),h(2),..] of block headers is called a linked chain if

• block numbers join without gaps, i.e. h(n).number+1 == h(n+1).number
• parent hashes match, i.e. h(n).hash == h(n+1).parentHash

General header linked chains layout diagram

  0                C                     D                E              (1)
  o----------------o---------------------o----------------o--->
  | <-- linked --> | <-- unprocessed --> | <-- linked --> |

Here, the single upper letter symbols 0, C, D, E denote block numbers. For convenience, these letters are also identified with its associated block header or the full blocks. Saying "the header 0" is short for "the header with block number 0".

Meaning of 0, C, D, E:

• 0 -- Genesis, block number number 0
• C -- coupler, maximal block number of linked chain starting at 0
• D -- dangling, minimal block number of linked chain ending at E with C <= D
• E -- end, block number of some finalised block (not necessarily the latest one)

This definition implies 0 <= C <= D <= E and the state of the header linked chains can uniquely be described by the triple of block numbers (C,D,E).

Storage of header chains:

Some block numbers from the closed interval (including end points) [0,C] may correspond to finalised blocks, e.g. the sub-interval [0,base] where base is the block number of the ledger state. The headers for [0,base] are stored in the persistent state database. The headers for the half open interval (base,C] are always stored on the beaconHeader column of the KVT database.

The block numbers from the interval [D,E] also reside on the beaconHeader column of the KVT database table.

Header linked chains initialisation:

Minimal layout on a pristine system

  0                                                                      (2)
  C
  D
  E
  o--->

When first initialised, the header linked chains are set to (0,0,0).

Updating a header linked chains:

A header chain with an non empty open interval (C,D) can be updated only by increasing C or decreasing D by adding/prepending headers so that the linked chain condition is not violated.

Only when the gap open interval (C,D) vanishes, the right end E can be increased to a larger target block number T, say. This block number will typically be the consensus head. Then

• C==D beacuse the open interval (C,D) is empty
• C==E because C is maximal (see definition of C above)

and the header chains (E,E,E) (depicted in (3) below) can be set to (C,T,T) as depicted in (4) below.

Layout before updating of E

                   C                                                     (3)
                   D
  0                E                     T
  o----------------o---------------------o---->
  | <-- linked --> |

New layout with moving D and E to T

                                         D'                              (4)
  0                C                     E'
  o----------------o---------------------o---->
  | <-- linked --> | <-- unprocessed --> |

with D'=T and E'=T.

Note that diagram (3) is a generalisation of (2).

Complete a header linked chain:

The header chain is relatively complete if it satisfies clause (3) above for 0 < C. It is fully complete if E==T. It should be obvious that the latter condition is temporary only on a live system (as T is contiuously updated.)

If a relatively complete header chain is reached for the first time, the execution layer can start running an importer in the background compiling/executing blocks (starting from block number #1.) So the ledger database state will be updated incrementally.

Block chain import/execution

The following diagram with a parially imported/executed block chain amends the layout (1):

  0                  B       C                     D                E    (5)
  o------------------o-------o---------------------o----------------o-->
  | <-- imported --> |       |                     |                |
  | <-------  linked ------> | <-- unprocessed --> | <-- linked --> |

where B is the base, i.e. the base state block number of the last imported/executed block. It also refers to the global state block number of the ledger database.

The headers corresponding to the half open interval (B,C] will be completed by fetching block bodies and then import/execute them together with the already cached headers.

Running the sync process for MainNet

For syncing, a beacon node is needed that regularly informs via RPC of a recently finalised block header.

The beacon node program used here is the nimbus_beacon_node binary from the nimbus-eth2 project (any other, e.g.the light client will do.) Nimbus_beacon_node is started as

  ./run-mainnet-beacon-node.sh \
     --web3-url=http://127.0.0.1:8551 \
     --jwt-secret=/tmp/jwtsecret

where http://127.0.0.1:8551 is the URL of the sync process that receives the finalised block header (here on the same physical machine) and /tmp/jwtsecret is the shared secret file needed for mutual communication authentication.

It will take a while for nimbus_beacon_node to catch up (see the Nimbus Guide for details.)

Starting nimbus for syncing

As the syncing process is quite slow, it makes sense to pre-load the database from an Era1 archive (if available) before starting the real sync process. The command for importing an Era1 reproitory would be something like

   ./build/nimbus_execution_client import \
      --era1-dir:/path/to/main-era1/repo \
      ...

which will take its time for the full MainNet Era1 repository (but way faster than the beacon sync.)

On a system with memory considerably larger than 8GiB the nimbus binary is started on the same machine where the beacon node runs with the command

   ./build/nimbus_execution_client \
      --network=mainnet \
      --engine-api=true \
      --engine-api-port=8551 \
      --engine-api-ws=true \
      --jwt-secret=/tmp/jwtsecret \
      ...

Note that --engine-api-port=8551 and --jwt-secret=/tmp/jwtsecret match the corresponding options from the nimbus-eth2 beacon source example.

Syncing on a low memory machine

On a system with memory with 8GiB the following additional options proved useful for nimbus to reduce the memory footprint.

For the Era1 pre-load (if any) the following extra options apply to "nimbus import":

   --chunk-size=1024
   --debug-rocksdb-row-cache-size=512000
   --debug-rocksdb-block-cache-size=1500000

To start syncing, the following additional options apply to nimbus:

   --debug-beacon-chunk-size=384
   --debug-rocksdb-max-open-files=384
   --debug-rocksdb-write-buffer-size=50331648
   --debug-rocksdb-block-cache-size=1073741824
   --debug-rdb-key-cache-size=67108864
   --debug-rdb-vtx-cache-size=268435456

Also, to reduce the backlog for nimbus-eth2 stored on disk, the following changes might be considered. In the file nimbus-eth2/vendor/mainnet/metadata/config.yaml change the folloing settings

   MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOCK_REQUESTS: 33024
   MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOB_SIDECARS_REQUESTS: 4096

to

   MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOCK_REQUESTS: 8
   MIN_EPOCHS_FOR_BLOB_SIDECARS_REQUESTS: 8

Caveat: These changes are not useful when running nimbus_beacon_node as a production system.

Metrics

The following metrics are defined in worker/update/metrics.nim which will be available if nimbus is compiled with the additional make flags NIMFLAGS="-d:metrics --threads:on":

Variable	Logic type	Short description
beacon_base	block height	B, increasing
beacon_coupler	block height	C, increasing
beacon_dangling	block height	D
beacon_end	block height	E, increasing
beacon_target	block height	T, increasing
beacon_header_lists_staged	size	# of staged header list records
beacon_headers_unprocessed	size	# of accumulated header block numbers
beacon_block_lists_staged	size	# of staged block list records
beacon_blocks_unprocessed	size	# of accumulated body block numbers
beacon_buddies	size	# of peers working concurrently