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RE: @ned - are we on the verge of a Steemtrain wreck? Answer NO - BUT THERE ARE STILL VALID CONCERNS

in #steemit7 years ago

Maybe I would be answer some questions here, as a witness and operator of full API node that is used by various service providers on Steem.

Is the issue described in @elfspice's comments real?

From what he described it seems that he has real issues,
however Steem platform is fine.

Is the issue described in @elfspice's comments as serious as they seem to be?

For him? Yes. For platform? No.

My full API node is operating on a single, low-end dedicated server with amount of RAM as on my few years old workstation.
At this very moment it is serving 65 connections per second (average from 100 seconds). Disk latency is 2.6 - 4.0ms.

cpu-day.png

Of course there are some performance challenges that we witnesses, and others: community developers, Steemit Inc developers etc are aware of, those are being addressed, way ahead of time, but FUD-spreading-troll level talk is not even close to what I would like to spent my time on.

If this is not an issue, it is important to expose @elfspice as a source of FUD. I do not believe that to be the case right now. I think there is cause for concern.

It's not an issue and @elfspice is a source of FUD. Not for the first time.

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Hey there @gtg, I'd love it though if you would make a tutorial maybe on making a Full API node in best practices?

I use your node for my upcoming app, so it would be nice to make a few more for some load balancing and etc.

If I would have time for that...

Actually this is pretty straightforward, as long as you are not expecting to run it on potato-grate hardware ;-)
Also, a lot depends on certain needs. Not all the people needs really full node with all plugins. Most of people doesn't. Like for example exchanges mentioned by that troll are not using full nodes.
Most info needed to successfully run your node is in docs. You might want to modify that depending on your exact needs. Feel free to catch me on steemit.chat as Gandalf but expect some delays with answers.
I would gladly help with setting up public nodes.

BTW, I'm able to have considerably low amount of RAM mostly because I have decent speed on my storage backend. Current setup is very cost effective, however I'm running out of space (storage is fast but small, as I have 3 disks combined)

Ah, so instead of having 128GB RAM, you're using SSDs in RAID 5 for your swap backend?

RAID1
Of course having 128GB of RAM to keep there everything would be nice, but not cost effective.

I very much appreciate your extra clarity on this issue, but it does sound to me like that architecture won't scale beyond a few months without major work. I hope there are plans in place, and that Steem Inc. can communicate better on this issue in future.

Thanks again though!

@gtg thank you very much for offering your observations. I really appreciate it. I hope others do. When there is limited communication from the people that know these things, there is ample room for doubt. The majority of steemians, myself included are not technical. There are clearly issues but none of us know how serious they are and it is difficult to put things into context at times. None of us can read everything on here. I did not know that elfspice had spread FUD before.

Do you know why exchanges seem to be having difficulty offering a stable service for steem?

Do you know why exchanges seem to be having difficulty offering a stable service for steem?

Currently there are crazy times because of Bitcoin. Aside from that:
Bittrex is indeed having some delays recently but they are great at communication and I think we would be able to help them improve reliability.
Blocktrades is working flawlessly.
Poloniex well... multiple attempts to contact them, they were down today for hours... that's not related to Steem at all.

So, a virtual machine with 10 cores and 50gb of ram, that was doing just fine running a witness, and 3 months ago was running an RPC fine, and, a Ryzen7 1700, which I established I had to update a kernel to fix that problem, both somehow cannot replay the full chain, for an RPC, BOTH RUNNING UBUNTU 16.04, LATEST.

Prove you are not lying by taking a person, who has not had any dealings with you in the past, and helping them get an RPC up and running.

  • Because bittrex is having a problem.

  • Poloniex is basically refusing to deal with it anymore, they got bigger fish to fry.

  • Tradequik, over 48 hours 'routine, automated maintenance

  • Shapeshift quit dealing with Steem at least 2 weaks ago.

So, stop lying. What keeps your RPC up and running, and why is it that me, and 4 major, high end operations, cannot keep a steemd running?

Let us know what the secret is, or admit that you have much more fancy hardware, paid for with your premined stake, than you are admitting to.

I know enough about sysadmin to know, that your front end, could be bumping traffic to any number of backends. You could have over 10 Steemd nodes running, on a failover, and nobody would know, unless they could monitor the in-and-out on your server.

@furion thinks the following, which supports your hypothesis:

Full rpc steemd nodes are a challenge to run. Currently, they require expensive servers with 128GB of RAM, and regular baby-sitting. To my knowledge, there are no open solutions for managing steemd clusters . Such software would be much appreciated, not only by developers, but also exchanges (currently, both Bitfinex and Poloniex have STEEM&SBD deposits/withdrawals frozen, as they are failing to tame resource hungry steemd [2]).

https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/updates-on-steem-python-steemdata-and-the-node-situation

No wonder I was having trouble on a 50Gb xeon VPS with 10 cores and a 1.2tb SSD. When I started, back in November, this was still a bit difficult but it only needed about 32gb. In 6 months since, that requirement has quadrupled. If it quadruples again, there isn't a computer on the planet that sits inside one box, that can run this thing.

I'm not gonna hold my breath for an apology from these pigs who have been blatantly lying through their teeth.

Graphene, so great, it needs 128gb to run a 1 year old blockchain.

So, who's lining up to be part of Dan's next project?

Yes, no wonder, I see why you're bitter about this! It does make me feel sick, and the lies are really disappointing!

If EOS stores a more sensible amount of info in the blockchain though, it could be much more sustainable even if it's very similar underlying technology. Don't you agree?

I reckon he's probably learnt his lesson (technically), moved out and done something with a genuinely better architecture, though I don't know how good of course, and trust is pretty important!

Yeah, maybe he learned the error, but his narcissism prevents him from admitting his error.

Also, if EOS borrows from Ethereum, then it uses multiple backend data stores and not just one giant monolith. Different types too.

Hey lok1! We at TradeQwik were performing some upgrades across servers and adding a few( 4 new). STEEM was not the reason for our routine maintenance. Thanks man

Don't hesitate to talk about how it is running RPC nodes, if you please.

"Prove you are not lying" (...) "So, stop lying." (...) "what the secret is" (...) "admit that you have much more fancy hardware, paid for with your premined stake" (...) "I know enough about sysadmin" (...)

I'm sorry, I can't help you. That would be an illegal medical practice.

I've explicitly offered (and provided) help to people that needs API nodes for their businesses and reported on my own node status multiple times in my witness logs.

Right. So furion is lying, according to you. 3 days waiting for a replay on a 50gb machine with real SSD. It was running pretty good 6 months ago.

Also, help would be if you did even half the job @jesta already did with the only half way adequate guide to setting up and running one. If it wasn't special tricks you were doing, then why don't you publish exactly what you tell people to do. You know, like, your config.ini. Precise specs of your servers, and who manages the physical hardware.

Also, euthanasia is the illegal medical practise. You imply murder in what you just said, not a medical procedure.

Just so you know, I am screenshotting this. It looks like a veiled death threat to me.

Seriously? That is what you see there?
Are you seriously screenshootting content that was written on the blockchain?
You are insane*
(*) that's my subjective point of view, unfortunately, I'm not a doctor so I can't provide you a medical advice = "that would be an illegal medical practice"
Please seek your help among doctors, not witnesses.

Good luck.

Well, my non-professional medical opinion is that you are a sociopath with borderline personality disorder what I term 'cryptomania', like much of the rest of the preminer crowd here, Dan included.

What you don't realise is that you people have by any reasonable moral standard, committed heinous crimes against many people who have been duped into committing their money and time to this platform, all so you could milk the rewards pool with your inside tricks.

Please seek your help amongst fancy lawyers, with your ill gotten gains.

an Illegal medical practice, what lobotomy? euthanasia? what did you mean? Or just offering your medical opinion? Based on what qualifications and research?

Also, it's pretty rich coming from you giving a damn about the law when you and many others in the premine group are in clear breach of the Truth in Securities Act 1933, and most of you are in that jurisdiction.

Is anybody else having this issue other than elfspice? What problem could he have if you're facing none?

Already discussed. BKAC kind of problem that he fails to acknowledge blaming the rest of the world.

Thanks for clearing the air. Followed both you and elfspice. Good to listed to both the sides of the argument. Nice names by the way Loki and Gandalf the Grey.

If you were really not lying through your teeth, you would have helped me out, a long time ago, and I would have happily taught everyone the secret magic trick that you do to make your nodes function.

You really think that I am making trouble for ... wait a second, you are saying I am a troll?

Are you going to more fully clarify what the hell you mean by that? Some citations of me provoking people other than for a directly stated reason of provoking people into confessing they are lying?

I have been absolutely transparent. You have not, not even one bit.

"you would have helped me out, a long time ago"

Yes, indeed, you had a chance for that long time ago...
That would be before you've made your platform-leaving-FUD-performance with @faddat.

Just to remind you: you've used alleged issue with steem as an excuse for that. When I pointed out that it's not true and steem is working as expected then you've blamed @xeroc's python-lib which turned out to be your lack of understanding how it works.

Good luck with The Dawn.
The Steemians send their regards.

You are so out of date mate.

You don't think that Steem Power qualifies as a Financial Security? Really?

Let's see what happens when your giant RPC cluster is the last man standing and nobody can buy or sell Steem anymore, and finally all the exchanges quit, and the people who genuinely put tens of thousands of dollars into Steem, decide it's time to stop playing nice and seeing exactly who is responsible, and who the SEC might want to put in a cage.

By the way, regarding my error in using the wrong parser to output the JSON. wow, you think that was the first problem I came up against? You know that prior to that incident, the whole edifice of piston was in disarray, and scripts that had worked a month before, suddenly were not working with the newer version. Hm Stable API eh?

You'll get what's coming to you. I don't even have to see to it, I already did. The rest of the people who are here, apart from this inner circle of Steemians, are going to be out for your blood pretty soon.

Don't say I didn't warn you. And you're welcome. Your constant provocation and trolling me is the reason why I keep on pushing to get the real story out of you all.

Why do you keep commenting on 2 of your separate accounts?

I haven't even started talking about the login logout bugs I have been dealing with since I started using two accounts. Or how easy it is to forget which one is which. At least I'm not pretending it's different people, at least you know well enough, unlike so many who have been keeping me in their blind spot, that one person controls both.

If you want to see what I mean about the login bugs, and the lack of proper state transition between the resteems and upvote/downvotes, have two different accounts, log into one, then display a page, log out, and then log into the other one. You will find the vote display is not zeroed and re-created from the second account, and the resteems are persisting in the javascript caches after logging out and into a different account.

Right, I have to refresh every time.. this platform is so bugged.. they can't even fix the simplest shit.. which is how my friends and I were able to register 3000 accounts with 2 different bugs....................

Thanks @gtg.

What amount of RAM does your full API node have?

32GB currently, but that would flawlessly only with decent speed on storage backend (a lot of I/O has to be handled)

Thank you. We are trying to understand the discrepancy between what you're saying at what @furion is saying here:
https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/updates-on-steem-python-steemdata-and-the-node-situation

Can you help any further, to put this issue to bed, so I can keep investing my time in this great project?

As far as I can see, @furion seems to be satisfied with my node. Of course funding clusters of such ( or even better - much bigger ) nodes is always welcome.

It was the 128GB versus 32GB RAM difference that I was getting at, but now you've explained that you use SSD drives for swap it reconciles the apparent discrepancy for me. Thanks.

Ah, I see. Everything depends on exact environment. Low latency is crucial especially at initial reindexing. For example my 64GB backup API node performs much slower (at least at reindex) because it has a single SSD drive.

Oh right. I've been considering setting up a witness, but would only be interested in a full RPC node, as I'm doing development with RPC ( @steemreports).

Given that I'd need to do it remotely, so won't have access to the hardware, is there a suitable provider and server you could recommend? I getting the impression a VPS isn't going cut it for a number of reasons.

I'd very much appreciate any pointers.

Please note that a full RPC node and a witness node are two separate things and shouldn't be ever mixed.

As for VPS it might be viable as long as you have enough amount of dedicated resources (i.e. IOPS) guaranteed.
i3.2xlarge on AWS should do the thing.

Performance might vary a lot between providers despite same parameters on labels, also you need to figure out yourself what would be more suitable and cost effective - more RAM or faster storage.