This PR names and documents the concept of the archive: a range of slots
for which we have degraded functionality in terms of historical access -
in particular:
* we don't support rewinding to states in this range
* we don't keep an in-memory representation of the block dag
The archive de-facto exists in a trusted-node-synced node, but this PR
gives it a name and drops the in-memory digest index.
In order to satisfy `GetBlocksByRange` requests, we ensure that we have
blocks for the entire archive period via backfill. Future versions may
relax this further, adding a "pre-archive" period that is fully pruned.
During by-slot searches in the archive (both for libp2p and rest
requests), an extra database lookup is used to covert the given `slot`
to a `root` - future versions will avoid this using era files which
natively are indexed by `slot`. That said, the lookup is quite
fast compared to the actual block loading given how trivial the table
is - it's hard to measure, even.
A collateral benefit of this PR is that checkpoint-synced nodes will see
100-200MB memory usage savings, thanks to the dropped in-memory cache -
future pruning work will bring this benefit to full nodes as well.
* document chaindag storage architecture and assumptions
* look up parent using block id instead of full block in clearance
(future-proofing the code against a future in which blocks come from era
files)
* simplify finalized block init, always writing the backfill portion to
db at startup (to ensure lookups work as expected)
* preallocate some extra memory for finalized blocks, to avoid immediate
realloc
40a4c01086