b631f27246
Seek compaction is causing a cascade effect in the chainstate DB, causing large parts of the database to be rewritten every ~hour. Every periodic flush writes around 2 MiB. Since this is roughly the `write_buffer_size`, these writes regularly cause the memtable to rotate into a small L0 file. This file has a small seek budget, and with the random UTXO reads done during validation, it can get scheduled for seek compaction quickly. That seek compaction pushes the small file down to L1. Since most UTXOs are already lower down in L4/L5, many reads that consult this file do not find the key there and continue downward. The bloom filter makes those misses cheap, but LevelDB still decrements the file's seek budget. The file then gets scheduled for another seek compaction, and the same pattern pushes it down through L2 and L3. The expensive part happens around L3/L4. L4 has many ~32 MiB files holding the bulk of the UTXO set. When LevelDB compacts into L3, it may split the output into many smaller L3 files to limit how much L4 "grandparent" data any one output overlaps. Each of these small L3 files then gets its own small seek budget. Because chainstate keys are hash-random, each small L3 file can still have a broad key range, so many random reads consult it and quickly drain its budget. Once seek-compacted into L4, each tiny L3 file can overlap many L4 files, so compacting a few hundred KiB from L3 can require rewriting hundreds of MiB from L4. Repeating that across many small L3 files can rewrite most of the chainstate. This is a poor fit for chainstate because UTXO keys are hash-random, the DB is large enough to have many levels, writes are relatively small and periodic, and reads are frequent. The result is that read misses trigger compactions much earlier than size pressure would, and those compactions have very high write amplification. Disabling seek compaction may leave more files in upper levels for longer, so reads could theoretically consult more files. But Bitcoin Core enables bloom filters for all its LevelDB instances, so these misses are usually cheap in-memory filter checks rather than disk reads. For the other DBs, the risk is much smaller. They also use bloom filters, and most are smaller and less read-heavy. With fewer levels and less random read pressure, disabling seek compaction should have little effect there. Co-authored-by: l0rinc <pap.lorinc@gmail.com> Github-Pull: #35313 Rebased-From: 6bfdb6093bba4710d0f8313ed0113967a8b5176f
Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
What is Bitcoin Core?
Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.
Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the doc folder.
License
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
Development Process
The master branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. Tags are created
regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork that repository unless it is for development reasons.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.
Testing
Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.
Automated Testing
Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to
submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
(assuming they weren't disabled during the generation of the build system) with: ctest. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: build/test/functional/test_runner.py
(assuming build is your build directory).
The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing
Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.
Translations
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.
Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.
Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.